WAR ON TERRORISM What's happening

The latest developments in the war on terrorism:
AL-QAIDA CHIEF
U.S. counterterrorism authorities hope the newly captured chief of Al-Qaida's Persian Gulf operations, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will shed light on terror plots still in the works as President Bush praised the arrest: "We're making progress in the war against terrorists." "We did bring to justice a killer," Bush said today in Pushkin, Russia, where he was meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "The message is, we're making progress in the war against terrorists, that we are going to hunt them down one at a time. ... America and Russia and people who love freedom are one person safer as a result of finding this guy." Al-Nashiri, a Saudi, was captured earlier this month in an undisclosed foreign country and is now in U.S. custody, U.S. officials said Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity. A close associate of Osama bin Laden, al-Nashiri is suspected of being a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing in October 2000. After his capture, he was held briefly in Afghanistan before being flown to an undisclosed location, sources said.
BALI BOMBINGS
Indonesia's national police chief said today that a ringleader in the Bali blasts that killed nearly 200 people has confessed and admitted involvement in other bombings in the past two years. "He confessed to the bombings in Batam, Jakarta and Bali," said Gen. Da'i Bachtiar, referring to both the Bali nightclub blasts and a series of other bombings. Imam Samudra, in his early to mid-30s, was arrested Thursday at the port of Merak as he attempted to flee from Java island. Bachtiar spoke to reporters after interrogating Samudra today at a police station near Merak. Bachtiar said Samudra was a key planner in the Oct. 12 Bali blasts, adding that the militant "decided when and where" to place the bombs.
SUSPECTED ATTACK
An Iraqi man carrying explosives was arrested today in a posh Kabul neighborhood where many foreigners have homes and offices, a government official said. It is thought that the suspect planned to attack Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim in a suicide bombing, his secretary, Gulbuddin Hamdard, told The Associated Press. The Iraqi Kurd, identified by Afghan Television as Akram Taufiq Muramy, was picked up on a street corner in the capital's Wazir Akbar Khan District, Hamdard said. "The defense minister often travels this route. We are still investigating, but we think he was a suicide bomber," he said. Afghan's state-run television reported that the man entered Afghanistan from the east but was not more specific. Pakistan is Afghanistan's eastern neighbor. Radio Afghanistan said without elaborating, "He was part of an international terrorist network." U.S. intelligence says Al-Qaida operatives have fled to Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal regions bordering Afghanistan and to its teeming cities, such as Karachi.
Source: Associated Press