The broken door of the spacious two-story villa in this upper-middle class district of this city is the only outward sign that it was a terrorist hideout where the authorities say they captured a major leader of Al Qaeda, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. It was here in the Westridge district that the Pakistani authorities triumphantly announced the arrest of Mr. Mohammed along with an unidentified Middle Eastern man and a Pakistani man, Ahmed Qadoos. The home belongs to Mr. Qadoos’s elderly parents, but the son, 42, also lived there with his wife and two children. Mr. Mohammed, who was on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted terror list and is believed to have been the operational planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, was quickly handed over to the Americans for questioning at an undisclosed foreign location. Unlike the shootout last fall that resulted in the arrest of another top Qaeda member, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mr. Mohammed’s arrest came without incident. Early Saturday morning, Mr. Mohammed’s pursuers finally found the suspect who had long eluded them. Mr. Mohammed was pulled from his sleep to be photographed by the police, beardless, seemingly dazed, wearing a loose white T-shirt against the backdrop of an apartment with paint peeling from the walls. The man whose continued involvement in planning attacks was, intelligence officials said, a major cause of raising the terror alert in the United States last month, found himself in American hands. Mr. Mohammed had been hiding in the Rawalpindi house “for quite some time,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat, said in a telephone interview this afternoon. Full Story
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