'Qaeda chief in Iraq' arrested: TV

By Hassan Jouini AFP - Thursday, May 8 10:57 pm

BAGHDAD (AFP) - A man calling himself the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been arrested in the north of the country, state television reported on Thursday quoting an interior ministry spokesman.

Major General Abdul Karim Khalaf told Al-Iraqiya that the detained man claimed he was Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, who is also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, but that investigations were under way to verify his identity.

"He was arrested in Wad al-Hajar region of Nineveh during a raid yesterday (Wednesday)," Khalaf said. "Now we are conducting more investigations to confirm whether he is Abu Hamza."

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

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

Muhajir, whose real name according to the US military is Abu Ayyub al-Masri, is an Egyptian national who was made the chief of the jihadist group in Iraq after the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a US air strike in June 2006.

Last year, there had been reports that Masri had been killed, but they were later denied.

US military spokesman Major Bradford Leighton said the military was checking the latest report.

"We have no operational reports on that yet. We are checking into it," he told AFP.

The US State Department had posted a five million dollar reward for information leading to Masri's arrest.

The Al-Qaeda kingpin is a car bomb expert, and the details about his real identity -- even his name-- have been a source of debate among Iraqi and US security officials.

Al-Qaeda has said in Internet messages last year that its new leader was one Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, rather than the more foreign-sounding Masri, whose name means "the Egyptian."

US officials, however, say the two are one and the same.

Analysts believe that Masri 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.

Masri 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 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.

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