Al Qaeda terror suspect Rashid Rauf is still alive, his lawyer claimed on Monday, terming the reports that he had died in a United States missile strike in North-West Pakistan as a 'fake story'. "We don't believe that the story published today that Rashid Rauf is killed is true... It is a fake story. We still believe that my client, Rashid, is alive," his lawyer Hashmat Ali Habib told BBC. A news report claimed that Britain's intelligence services were kept in the dark.
Rashid Rauf, the terror mastermind believed to be behind the 2006 trans-Atlantic plane bombing plot, and another top al Qaeda operative were among five militants killed in a United States missile attack on Saturday which hit the house of a prominent Taliban commander in Pakistan's troubled north-west.Rashid Rauf, a British-Pakistani citizen, was one of two of the suspected ringleaders of the al Qaeda London Airline plot to destroy the aircraft en route to the United States.
Assistant United States attorney, Jeffery H Knox, speaking in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Friday, revealed that two senior Al-Qaeda leaders were instrumental in developing this plan.
JeM, which counts Atlantic Airline bombing plotter and Al-Qaeda suspect Rashid Rauf as a member, has occupied a 4.5 acre-land outside the populated town of Bahawalpur to train jihadists in warfare, The Telegraph reports.
A top Member of Parliament in the UK has asked if the government knew about the US missile strike in Pakistan which killed an on-the-run militant from the UK.
Terror suspect Rashid Rauf, arrested by Pakistani authorities in connection with a plot to bomb airliners in Britain last year, escaped from police custody shortly after being produced in a court on Saturday.
The report disputed claims by Islamabad police that Rauf escaped while he was being taken from Islamabad to Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi. It also described the claim by his two police guards that he mysteriously disappeared from the mosque as 'concocted'.
The key planner Rauf used to be a part of JeM.
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