Huma Aamir Malik, Special to Arab News

KARACHI, 27 September 2003 — Intelligence agents arrested two suspected Al-Qaeda militants in an Internet cafe after catching them sending e-mails to fellow terrorists, officials said yesterday. (See also Page 6)

Working on a tip-off, agents followed the men for two days and monitored e-mails they had allegedly sent from the northwestern city of Peshawar, intelligence officials said. Agents posing as customers in the Internet cafe swooped on the pair Thursday after one of them, a Yemeni national, sent an e-mail, the officials said. The other man’s nationality was not revealed.

The officials declined to comment on the content of the e-mails and would only say that they were sent to “terrorists.” One of the two men was identified as Khalid Ahmed; the name of the other was not given. The authorities said the suspects were being questioned at an undisclosed location.

The arrests came less than a week after police captured the younger brother of Hambali, Al-Qaeda’s alleged top agent in Southeast Asia. Rusman Gunawan, an Indonesian, was arrested in the southern port city of Karachi on Saturday with 16 Islamic students from Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar.

Pakistani intelligence officials have said they believe Gunawan, 27, was running the Pakistani branch of the Jemaah Islamiyah terror group, blamed for last October’s Bali bombings that killed 202 people.

The arrests have highlighted a suspected network of links between Al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah.

Many alleged Jemaah Islamiyah leaders, including Hambali, are believed to have trained at Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and dozens of Indonesian Islamic students are believed to be in the region.