Islamabad: Pakistan intelligence has confirmed that a suspected key aide of Saudi extremist leader Osama bin Laden has been flown out of Pakistan.

A senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told 'The News' that Adil al-Jazeeri was put aboard an American plane in Peshawar over the weekend and taken out of the country.

The official said he believed the Jazeeri had been flown out to the Bagram Air Force base in neighbouring Afghanistan where American forces have a presence.

Al-Jazeeri, an Algerian national, was arrested in June in the upscale residential district of Hayatabad in Peshawar, which borders Afghanistan.

"He (Jazeeri) was interrogated here. He is among the important people of al-Qaida. Useful information can be obtained from him during further investigation," the official said.

Another al-Qaida suspect, Abu Naseem of Tunisia, was also arrested near Peshawar the same day as al-Jazeeri. Neither figure on the US-based Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) most wanted terrorists list.

Nearly 500 al-Qaida suspects have been arrested in Pakistan and most have been handed over to the United States.

The rounding up of these extremists follows the US armed forces blitzkrieg against Afghanistan's radical Taleban regime in 2001-2002 in their search and kill operation for Osama bin Laden.

Washington identifies bin Laden as the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 air strikes on the World Trade Center in New York and at the Pentagon in Washington, besides many other such attacks in the 1980s and mid-1990s.

The US sees Pakistan as a key ally in its war against terrorism. Among the extremists caught in Pakistan are Abu Zubaydah, bin Laden's top terror co-ordinator in Faisalabad in March 2002, Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected planner of the attacks in the United States, who was captured in September 2002 in Karachi, Waleed Mohammed bin Attash, a Yemeni, allegedly involved in the bombing of the US Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000.

ANI