Farooqi schemed Musharraf attacks

Two attempts to kill Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last year were masterminded by a militant leader linked to US journalist Daniel Pearl's murder and Al Qaida's number three, a senior security official said.

Amjad Farooqi, 30, was the "very clever" Pakistani mastermind Musharraf referred to in a local television interview Thursday in which he outlined the involvement of low-ranking army and air force officers in the first attempt on his life on December 14, the official said on condition of anonymity.

"Investigators have conclusively established that Amjad Farooqi hatched the plot to kill the president, with the prompting and assistance of the Al Qaida terror network," he said.

A senior security official identified Farooqi as a key operative of Harkatul Jihad Islami militant outfit.

Musharraf himself had not identified the Pakistani, saying it would compromise a manhunt for the militant who had been close to capture several times. Farooqi had close contact with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaida's number three and the alleged chief planner of the September 11, 2001 attacks, before Mohammed's March 2003 arrest near Islamabad, the official said.

He was also intricately involved in the elaborate plot to abduct and murder Wall Street Journal reporter Pearl in early 2002, he said.

Farooqi is believed to have provided the militants who held Pearl in a shed on Karachi's outskirts after the reporter was abducted on January 23, 2002 as he went to what he believed would be an interview with another militant leader. And he provided a trio of Arab-looking men who turned up on the sixth day of Pearl's captivity and beheaded him on camera, the official said.

Farooqi is described as a "right-hand man" of the militant convicted of plotting Pearl's abduction and murder, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. "He gave the gang to Sheikh Omar which executed Daniel Pearl," the security official said. Farooqi has a three-million-rupee ($52,000) bounty on his head and has been missing for more than two years.

Musharraf said in the television interview that the Pakistani mastermind was hired by a foreign Al Qaida operative to execute the December 14 and December 25 attempts to assassinate him.

"At what level this foreign initiative, whether it comes at the highest level, some orders from the highest level, which I mean (Ayman) Al Zawahiri or Osama bin Laden, I don't know that. "But certainly a foreigner is involved, a non-Pakistani," he told the Geo Television channel Thursday.

"And then they hire a Pakistani extremist. He gets the money, he gets the support. He then puts up a team to act. So therefore this becomes the operative man and he organises a team and he gets people, extremists of ours. He inducts them and they then execute the plan," he said.