US says Qaeda chief in Iraq not captured

by Jay Deshmukh Fri May 9, 10:08 AM ET

BAGHDAD (AFP) - The US military denied on Friday that Al-Qaeda in Iraq chief Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, who carries a US bounty of five million dollars, had been captured by security forces.

State television Al-Iraqiya reported on Thursday that a man calling himself as Muhajir was captured by Iraqi forces in the northern province of Nineveh.

US military spokeswoman Major Peggy Kageleiry said the detained individual was not Muhajir, whose real name according to the military is Abu Ayyub al-Masri.

"They did not catch Abu Hamza al-Muhajir. Somebody with same name but not connected with him. It is not him," Kageleiry told AFP.

When asked if the military confirmed Muhajir was not in the custody of security forces, she said: "I confirm that."

Major General Abdul Karim Khalaf, spokesman for Iraq's interior ministry had told Al-Iraqiya on Thursday that the detained man claimed he was Muhajir and that investigations were under way to verify his identity.

Khalaf said he was arrested in a raid on Wednesday in the Wad Al-Hajar region of Nineveh province. The region's capital Mosul is considered the last urban bastion of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to the US military.

US and Iraqi forces are involved in sustained military assaults targeting Al-Qaeda militants in Nineveh.

Khalaf said the arrest came after a man close to the detained individual said the Al-Qaeda chief was in a house in Wad Al-Hajar.

"The police then raided the area and captured the man who said 'I am Abu Hamza al-Muhajir,'" Khalaf said.

Muhajir is an Egyptian national who was made the chief of the jihadist group in Iraq after a US air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006, the US military said.

The US State Department has posted a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to Muhajir's arrest.

The details about Muhajir's real identity -- even his name -- have been a source of debate among Iraqi and US security officials. Last year, there were reports that Muhajir had been killed, but they were later denied.

In Internet messages last year Al-Qaeda gave the name of its new leader as Muhajir, rather than using the more foreign-sounding name Masri, which means "the Egyptian." US officials say the two names refer to the same man.

Analysts believe that Muhajir is one of a generation of Islamist militants who carried out attacks in Egypt throughout the 1980s and 1990s before travelling to Afghanistan and joining Al-Qaeda.

The US military believes he is an explosives expert specialising in the construction of car bombs, a key weapon of Iraq's Sunni insurgency, and that he made his way to Iraq from Afghanistan after the March 2003 invasion.

Muhajir and Zarqawi met in Afghanistan in 1999, according to US officials, when they were both at Al-Faruq training camp where he became an explosives expert.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is blamed for some of the bloodiest and spectacular attacks in the country, which is still in the grip of a deadly insurgency and sectarian fighting.

In April, Muhajir announced a campaign in which the group will "offer the head of an American" as a gift to US President George W. Bush, in a speech monitored by the SITE Intelligence Group.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has also in the past said it is led by an Iraqi, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, but US commanders say he is a "cyber invention" and that he is a straw man invented to put an Iraqi face on a terrorist group led by foreigners who infiltrated Iraq to sow chaos and undermine the US-backed government.