A few hours earlier, New Yorkers watching late-night television news had been told official sources had identified the alleged mastermind as a British citizen called Rashid Rauf. A few hours later, Pakistani authorities were reporting that he had already been captured.

Little was known about Rauf at that time, other than that he was from Birmingham and that he had flown to Pakistan four years earlier, one step ahead of detectives who were eager to question him about the murder of his uncle. Eighteen months on, the alleged terrorist mastermind remains something of an enigma, even though he is at the center of another curious episode in the campaign against international jihadist terror -- one far more difficult to fathom than the alleged airline bomb plot.

Shortly before Christmas, Rauf is said to have escaped from Pakistani custody when two policemen escorting him from court in the capital, Islamabad, to a jail outside the nearby city of Rawalpindi stopped to allow him to pray in a roadside mosque. The officers claimed that when Rauf walked into the mosque they waited outside in their car, never considering for a moment that he could simply walk out of the back door.

BRIBED?

Both policemen are now themselves in custody, and the official Pakistani government explanation is that they were bribed. It is an explanation that appears to satisfy Western officials in Islamabad.

"The policemen must have been paid off, they didn't report it for several hours," said one. "The Pakistani government is seriously embarrassed by this."

Others are not so sure, however, and suspect that Rauf may still be in custody, this time at one of the secret detention centers that the formidable Pakistani security agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is known to operate at anonymous suburban villas.

"It wasn't an escape from custody," said his lawyer, Hashmat Ali Habib. "You could call it a `mysterious disappearance' if you like, but not an escape. The Pakistanis are simply not interested in handing him over to the British. They never have been, although it is not clear why not."

What is clear is that in a country where ties of family and faith can mean more than duty or the letter of the law, where intelligence agencies stand accused of operating like terrorists and where terrorist gangs are the creation of those same agencies, nothing can be taken for granted in the strange disappearance of Rashid Rauf.

The son of a successful businessman from the Ward End area of Birmingham, east of the city center, Rauf, 27, had already pulled off one vanishing act, in April 2002, after his uncle, Mohammed Saeed, was stabbed repeatedly in the stomach as he walked home from work. Saeed, 54, managed to stagger the few meters to his front door, where he collapsed in front of his wife and children. The motive for his killing has never been made public, but if West Midlands police ever get their hands on Rauf, they say he will face a charge of murder.

Once in Pakistan, the young Brummie headed for Bahawalpur, a small town 700km south of Islamabad where he knew a local imam, a man who had stayed at his family home while preaching in the UK. Despite speaking very little Urdu, Rauf was soon engaged to marry the imam's daughter. It was a union that brought him close to an organization once described as the deadliest terrorist group on the subcontinent.

Rauf's wife is closely related by marriage to Maulana Masood Azhar, the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed, or Army of Mohammed, a group that enjoyed close links with the ISI during the 1990s, when it was helping the Pakistani government wage a proxy war against India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Outlawed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, at the insistence of the US, Jaish-e-Mohammed has been alleged to have been implicated in the murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, and is accused of orchestrating a string of suicide bombing attacks in Pakistan. Despite this, it operates almost openly across Pakistan under a number of different names, and undoubtedly still has contacts within the ISI and the Pakistani police.

ARRESTED

Rauf was picked up in Bahawalpur in early August 2006, almost a week before any airliner terrorism suspects were detained in the UK. The US had been urging the British and Pakistani authorities to move quickly, and when they threatened to detain Rauf themselves, and hurl him into their so-called extraordinary rendition program, the ISI arrested him.

After being held incommunicado by the ISI, Rauf was brought before court accused of terrorism offenses, and remanded to Adiala prison, where violence and extortion is rife and where a parliamentary human rights commission concluded after a visit in May 2006 that "most prisoners showed signs of physical abuse." Rauf subsequently told his lawyer that he had been mistreated, and that he had been interrogated by Westerners as well as Pakistani officials.

In December 2006, a judge threw out the terrorism charges, but Rauf remained in custody for a further year, accused of possessing explosives and carrying forged identity papers.

Then, last November, a lower court ordered his release after those charges were withdrawn. Within 30 minutes, the government announced that he was to be extradited to the UK, and the following day he was detained for a further 90 days.

To complicate matters, the Pakistani government had been insisting for several months that Rauf would be handed over only if the British extradited two Pakistani men living in London. The pair -- separatists from the southwestern province of Balochistan -- are accused by Islamabad of terrorism, which they firmly deny.

While the British government insisted there could be no such swap, the two men were arrested by Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command within three weeks of extradition proceedings beginning against Rauf, and are fighting to remain in the UK.

Under the terms of the extradition process, Rauf was to be brought regularly before a court in Islamabad, 29km from Adiala prison. On Dec. 14, Habib heard shortly after lunch that his client had unlocked his handcuffs and escaped while being taken to court.

That evening, however, Islamabad police said that two policemen escorting him from court had taken him to a McDonald's drive-in in Rawalpindi later that afternoon before allowing him to pray alone at a mosque, still handcuffed. And then, according to the official account, the alleged British terrorist mastermind simply melted away.

DISINTERESTED

McDonald's, in the neighborhood known as Civil Lines, is a place where teenagers hum to music echoing from the speakers while security guards carefully search their cars for bombs. The manager is clearly tired of answering questions about Rauf.

"I can tell you what I have told the police," he said. "Nobody noticed them. But we have lots of policemen coming here, and lots of people who look like Rauf."

A few kilometers away on Adiala Road, leading from the city to the prison, there was a similar story at Rukhshanda mosque.

"We don't remember seeing Rauf that day, and the police didn't come in looking for him," the caretaker said. "We only know he's supposed to have escaped from here because the police have been back every day since, asking questions."

At the back of the mosque is a small yard bounded by a head-high wall. Behind the wall is an alley, at the end of which lie open fields. And somewhere beyond those, according to the official account, perhaps hiding with members of Jaish-e-Mohammed, is the young man from Birmingham who plotted to bring down 10 trans-Atlantic airliners.

It is an account that makes Rauf's lawyer smile.

"Look, many people, thousands of people, disappear in Pakistan," Habib said. "The government knows what it means, and the people know what it means."

Like most Pakistanis, Habib is afraid of the ISI, and is reluctant to name the agency.

"You can infer what you like," is all he will say.

Human rights organizations are not so apprehensive. Amnesty International said in a recent report that in the Pakistani government's enthusiasm for the so-called war on terror, "many people have been detained incommunicado in undisclosed places of detention and tortured or ill-treated ... some have been charged with criminal offenses unrelated to terrorism, others have been released without charge, reportedly after being warned to keep quiet about their experience, while some have been found dead."

Habib does not believe that Rauf has disappeared for ever.

"Sometimes in Pakistan, people come home after two or three years saying they were just taken out of prison and left at the side of a main road," he said. "Or sometimes people are brought to the surface by the authorities, for some reason or other."

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2008/01/31/2003399647