A dissident member of a militant Islamic group that kidnapped three UN workers in Afghanistan provided the tip that led to the arrest of the organization's leader, a Pakistani security official said Sunday. 

Syed Akbar Agha, a former Taliban front-line commander in Afghanistan who later founded Jaish-al Muslimeen, or Army of Muslims, was captured in the southern city of Karachi last week. The government initially kept his seizure a secret in hopes that his interrogation could provide leads on other suspects.

"We have arrested the mastermind of the kidnapping of the UN workers in Afghanistan," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said on Saturday.

Yesterday the police chief in southern Sindh Province, of which Karachi is the capital, said Agha was arrested by the intelligence agents on December 3 during a raid on an apartment in the neighborhood of Gulsha-e-Iqbal.

"At the time, his family members were also detained, but they were freed on December 9," said Kamal Shah. He said Agha's family had occupied the apartment for about eight months.

Shah said Agha's real name is Abdul Karim Haqqani, according to a Pakistani national identity card he was carrying. However, local residents knew him as Mohammed Mustafa, he said.

A security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a dissident member of Agha's group provided the location of an apartment where the leader was living with his family.

Pakistani intelligence agents also arrested Abdul Hinan Hemat, head of the Taliban's Bakhtar News Agency, along with another person in the southwestern city of Quetta, a Taliban spokesman said.

The government had no immediate comment on the claim, and it was unclear if the two arrests were linked. Hemat was one of the main media personalities during the Taliban regime, which was ousted as a result of US-led operations in late 2001.

Armed men seized Annetta Flanigan from Northern Ireland, Philippine diplomat Angelito Nayan and Shqipe Hebibi of Kosovo on October 28.

Agha last month said he would free the trio if Afghan authorities accepted the group's demand for the release of 26 prisoners held in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The kidnappers later abandoned their captives unharmed on a street in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on November 23. Afghan officials insist no ransom was paid or any other concessions were made to gain their release.

Afghan and US officials had sought Islamabad's help to track Agha down, after he used a mobile phone to contact some media to claim responsibility for the abduction, an intelligence official said.

Pakistan has arrested more than 600 al-Qaeda suspects, including some associates of Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in the Pakistan-Afghan border region.

(China Daily December 13, 2004)