Pakistan Extradites Terror Suspect

By Jamal Halaby
Associated Press Writer
Friday, Dec. 17, 1999; 8:33 a.m. EST

AMMAN, Jordan –– Pakistan has extradited a Jordanian suspected of leading a group accused of planning terror attacks on tourist sites and U.S. targets in the kingdom during millennium celebrations, an official said today.

Khalil Deek was returned home Thursday, where he was taken into police custody, said one of the officials, speaking on condition he not be identified.

Deek's detention raises to 14 – 12 Jordanians, one Iraqi and an Algerian – the number of the group in custody said to be affiliated with exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.

Two suspects remain at large, both outside Jordan. "Contacts are under way for the arrest and the handover of the other two," the official said, declining to elaborate.

Deek, who was arrested Tuesday in his home in Peshawar on Pakistan's northern border with Afghanistan, is believed to be the mastermind of the cell arrested in Jordan this week, the official told The Associated Press.

U.S. authorities also sought Deek, who also has a U.S. passport, the official said. But he was extradited to Jordan because "our request was made earlier than the Americans."

In Pakistan, an intelligence official gave a similar account of a Jordanian-born U.S. citizen being arrested Tuesday in Peshawar. But he identified the suspect only as Sayed, and said the man has held several meetings with bin Laden in Afghanistan.

It was not immediately clear if the Jordanian and Pakistani officials were referring to the same man.

Meanwhile, a Jordanian security official said two more Jordanians were arrested Thursday on suspicion of links with the terrorist group. He declined to elaborate, but stressed that the official count of cell members arrested will not rise to 16 because there is no solid information on their affiliation.

U.S. officials in Washington have said the suspects arrested in Jordan had planned attacks against U.S. targets in the kingdom. They said Washington was aware of arrests linked to a terrorist threat, some with possible ties to bin Laden, when the State Department issued a travel warning to Americans over the weekend. The warning said anti-American terrorists could target locations where there would be large 2000 celebrations.

Jordanian officials have played down the threat to Americans, saying Jordanian personalities, tourist and other sites here were targeted at year-end Christian celebrations.

The militants received training at camps in Afghanistan, Prime Minister Abdur-Ra'uf S. Rawabdeh told Parliament on Wednesday.

Officials close to the investigations said the group was in the early planning stages, surveying plausible targets.

Preliminary investigations revealed that the cell was "sophisticated" and financed by a Jordanian known as Omar Abu Omar, a close aide to bin Laden, the officials added.

A Jordanian court sentenced Abu Omar in absentia to life in jail in 1996 for leading a group known as "Reform and Challenge" that planned attacks in Jordan earlier this decade.

Abu Omar lives in Britain, where he was granted asylum a few years ago, the officials added.

Bin Laden, of a wealthy Saudi construction family, has been indicted by a New York grand jury on charges of conspiracy and murder in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 259 people.