Out of jail in Pakistan after three years, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, 28, a computer engineer, is happy. But authorities in London and Washington are not.
Pakistan's decision to release the suspect al Qaeda expert accused of training suicide bombers and plotting to attack Heathrow airport has raised many intelligence eyebrows in the United States and the United Kingdom, The Guardian reported on Thursday.
Terming Khan's release as a reward, the paper said the engineer was released after he the spilled beans about a terrorist network in Britain and how he often relayed messages from Pakistan to a top al Qaeda operative.
The Western intelligence sources described the Karachi-based engineer as a significant individual, while his lawyer, Babar Awan, said that all charges had "gone with the wind".
The paper said the media had been prevented from interviewing Khan, who remains under tight surveillance. His low-key release contrasted with the clamour after his capture in July 2004, which authorities celebrated as a big blow to al Qaeda.
Khan was alleged to have been the conduit for scrambled e-mail communications between al Qaeda leaders in the tribal belt and the outside world, the paper said.
A seized laptop, the paper said quoting sources, contained blueprints of potential targets for al Qaeda, in Britain and the US, including photographs and plans of Heathrow airport and underpasses in London.
His arrest led the British police and security service officers to Dhiren Barot, who was imprisoned last year for 40 years for planning a bombing campaign, including a plan to fill expensive cars with explosives and gas cylinders, park them beneath buildings and then detonate them. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian who allegedly helped bomb American embassies in Africa in 1998, was also nailed.
US officials and analysts said they were dismayed at his release.
"I find it strange and baffling," said Seth Jones, Rand Corporation, a Washington think tank told The Guardian."It is also deeply reprehensible since Khan was involved in training al Qaeda operatives. He is a major threat to the West,' he said.
But human rights activists questioned whether Khan was really a terrorist mastermind as portrayed.
"If he is so dangerous a suspect in the war on terror then why has he not been charged for the last three years?" said Ali Dayan Hasan, Human Rights Watch.
Khan's release in mid-July was all the more puzzling considering the Pakistani government's claims about his seniority in al Qaeda. In his autobiography published last year, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf describes an unnamed al Qaeda operative with an identical profile to that of Khan as the organisation's "information technology chief in Pakistan".
Musharraf said the man had been recruited by the 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, who had trained a 12-man suicide squad intended to hit US interests around the world, and conducted reconnaissance of Heathrow airport in preparation for a possible attack.
Now Khan, said to be living with his parents in Karachi, is subject to speculation that he was an al Qaeda double agent, or had been "turned" by the Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.
But his release also comes amid unprecedented action by Pakistan's Supreme Court, which is pressing the government to locate hundreds of people detained without trial. One former intelligence official told the BBC that Khan's story was a "murky tale" in which there were "no clear answers".
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