New York: The source for the tip that al-Qaida leaders are attempting to mount another multi-pronged airline hijacking attack is Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi or "Abu Bakr," an al-Qaida field commander who surrendered to Saudi authorities June 26, a media report said on August 1.

'Time' magazine quoted two official sources as saying that al-Ghamdi is providing an intelligence windfall about potential al-Qaida plots against the US, Western and Saudi governments.

The sources said Saudi authorities passed al-Ghamdi's allegations about what could be multiple airline hijackings to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which then briefed President Bush and also provided them to the Department of Homeland Security.

The al-Ghamdi revelations could partly explain why the Bush administration is so determined to maintain smooth relations with the Saudi government in the wake of a Congressional report, which blanks out 28 pages of information about informal financial links to terror groups, 'Time' said.

Disclosure of Abu Bakr's role in feeding information to US Intelligence could also be part of a campaign by the Saudis to counter suggestions that the royal kingdom is soft on terror, the magazine said.

Since a series of bombings in early May in Riyadh, the Saudi government has killed or arrested 175 people. Al-Ghamdi is thought to have been the ringleader of those attacks.

US intelligence believes that al-Ghamdi was trained at Osama bin Laden's al-Farouq camp and fought with the al-Qaida leader at Tora Bora. Escaping the US bombardment, he returned to his native Saudi Arabia and reported to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, plotting "second wave" attacks on Americans and their allies until Mohammed's arrest in Pakistan in March 2003.

As more and more al-Qaida field leaders were rounded up, al-Ghamdi rose in the ranks, safely hiding in Saudi Arabia until the May 12 attacks galvanised the kingdom's rulers into cracking down, time said.

US officials, it said, believe al-Ghamdi may have a knowledge of conspiracies now being hatched all over the world, and that he could reveal previously unidentified sleeper cells in the US and Canada. There is even a chance he could know something about the whereabouts of the elusive bin Laden, 'Time' added.

PTI