By Paul Watson
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A suspected Al-Qaida explosives expert being hunted for more than a year by the FBI met secretly in Pakistan last spring with one of the terrorist network's planners and a computer engineer, Pakistani officials said Monday.
The suspected bomb maker, described as an Arab, managed to slip out of Pakistan along with senior Al-Qaida member Abu Eisa al-Hindi after a March meeting with computer engineer and communications coordinator Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan in the city of Lahore, said Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan of the Pakistan military.
Investigators found surveillance reports on buildings in the United States and Britain on Khan's computers and dozens of disks. But nothing that Khan told interrogators suggested a new attack plan was discussed at the March meeting, Sultan said in an interview.
``They just met. That is it,'' he said.
The major general said he could not identify the suspected explosives expert or his nationality. Time magazine identified him Monday as Adnan el-Shukrijumah, 29.
More than a year ago, the U.S. State Department offered a reward of as much as $5 million for information leading to Shukrijumah's arrest. In March 2003, the FBI described him as having several Arab aliases and carrying a Guyanese passport, but who might try to enter the United States with a Saudi, Canadian or Trinidadian passport.
At the time, his father told reporters that Shukrijumah had left home in the United States three years earlier and was last heard from in Morocco, where he was working as a computer engineer.
Pakistani authorities don't know where the suspected Al-Qaida bomb maker headed after the March meeting in Lahore, the major general said.
``I don't think he is in Pakistan,'' Sultan said. ``He is at large. I can't say there was a flaw in security. He might have come under some cover. We don't know because it was a discreet meeting.''
A senior Iranian military commander says Iran would destroy Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor, if the Jewish state were to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iran's first nuclear power station, at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf coast, is scheduled to begin operating next year.
Israel has not directly threatened to attack the facility. But the United States says it suspects Iran is secretly building nuclear weapons, and Israel says it will not allow Tehran to have a nuclear bomb.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for generating electricity and other peaceful uses.
Israel has never confirmed or denied having a nuclear arsenal. But its reactor at Dimona is widely believed to be the source of plutonium used to build as many as 200 nuclear warheads.