‘High-value’ target trapped, says Pak, could be Osama’s No 2

Hours after US Secretary of State Colin Powell left Pakistan announced that Islamabad would now be a ‘‘major non-NATO US ally,&#14...

Hours after US Secretary of State Colin Powell left Pakistan announced that Islamabad would now be a ‘‘major non-NATO US ally,’’ a Pak official said tonight that forces may have surrounded Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, in a remote tribal region near the border with Afghanistan.

‘‘Judging by the resistance that is being offered there, we feel that there may be a high value target,’’ Pak President Pervez Musharraf told CNN. Musharraf, who said he had spoken to a military commander, declined to speculate on the identity of the target. ‘‘They are giving fierce resistance, so he (the commander)

is reasonably sure there is a high-value target there,’’ Musharraf said.

Asked if it could be bin Laden or Zawahri, Musharraf said: ‘‘I am not going to say that because my previous experience is that whatever I say, headlines come that ‘he says Zawahri is there, or Osama’. I can’t. It would just be a guess. But I think that very likely there is a high value target. Who I don’t know,’’ he said.

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Citing Pak government sources, CNN said that an airstrike is planned for tomorrow at a group believed to be cornered Al Qaeda fighters. ‘‘Sometime after light fall it sounds like they will go in with helicopter gunships and they may go in with fixed wing. The plan is to go in by air tomorrow, or at least first light,’’ CNN correspondent Aaron Brown said, speaking from Pakistan.

Ayman al-Zawahri, 52, the bespectacled Egyptian physician, joined the outlawed Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) when he was in his teens and went on to become its leader. In 1998, he merged his group with Osama’s Al Qaeda. Decades ago he had given up an affluent life of a Cairo doctor to dedicate himself to the Islamic underground, a choice that would eventually take him, like bin Laden, to the mountains of Afghanistan.

He was tried, along with many others, for links to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He served a three-year jail term for illegal arms possession but was acquitted of the main charges. In 1985, Zawahri left Egypt for Pakistan, where he worked as a doctor treating fighters wounded in battles against Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan.

Zawahri joined forces with Osama in 1998 to form an alliance to strike US and Israeli interests. He has been indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He is a signatory, along with Osama, to a 1998 declaration of jihad ‘‘against the Jews and Crusaders’’ that heralded the September 11 attacks. Associates have described him as a ‘‘polite and shy person’’, and some even suggest he does not have the stomach to lead a militant network. Yet the Egyptian appeared side-by-side with Osama in cave hideouts and on mountainsides in several of the Al Qaeda videotapes made public since 2001. ‘‘Ayman is for bin Laden like the brain to the body,’’ said Montasser al-Zayat, a lawyer in Cairo who represented Zawahri in a trial.