Al-Qaida leader Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the network's chief of operations in the Persian Gulf, has been captured, senior U.S. government officials said Thursday.Al-Nashiri, a suspected mastermind of the USS Cole bombing in October 2000, was taken in an undisclosed foreign country earlier this month and is now in U.S. custody, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity... Al-Nashiri is suspected in a number of other al-Qaida terrorist plots, including the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings... U.S. intelligence believes he was behind the Oct. 6 attack on the French tanker off the coast of Yemen that left one crewman dead, said a U.S. defense official...
In addition to the Cole attack, officials say he has been involved with a number of plots targeting the U.S. Navy in the past three years.
He is thought to be behind a nearly identical attempt to bomb another destroyer, the USS The Sullivans, nine months before the Cole attack, at Aden. That attack failed when the suicide boat, overloaded with explosives, sank.
Most recently, he has been tied to a failed al-Qaida plot to bomb U.S. and British warships crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, U.S. officials have said. In June, three Saudis were arrested in Morocco in connection with that plot.
He is also suspected of being behind plans to bomb the 5th Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain, a plot revealed in January by another top al-Qaida operative captured by Pakistan after fleeing Afghanistan.