Al Qaeda is said to focus again on WMD

Recent intelligence shows that Abu Khabab, 54, is training Western recruits for chemical attacks in Europe and perhaps the United States, just as he did when he ran the "Khabab Camp" at Al Qaeda's sprawling Darunta training complex in Afghanistan's Tora Bora region before the Sept. 11 attacks, according to one senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the CIA's intelligence is classified.

Some experts questioned how far Al Qaeda could get in reconstituting a weapons program in the mountains of Pakistan.

"They are hemmed in in a way that makes it hard to do," said John V. Parachini, a senior analyst on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction at Rand Corp. "It's hard to get the industrial infrastructure together to do these things, and it's hard to get people that have the expertise to fashion these materials into weapons of mass destruction."

Several international counter-terrorism officials concurred with the U.S. intelligence assessment of Al Qaeda's weapons' effort. Raphael Perl, who heads the Action Against Terrorism Unit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said it is widely assumed that Al Qaeda developed chemical weapons years ago, and that if it doesn't have biological capabilities already, "they are certainly not far from it."

Given that Abu Khabab "has the technical knowledge," he said, "it's very, very clear that they are working both in the chemical and biological fields."

Pakistani Information Minister Nisar Memon refused to comment on Abu Khabab and Al Qaeda's weapons program, but security officials from three Pakistani intelligence agencies, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that he is alive.

The senior U.S. intelligence official described Al Qaeda's effort as "a very small, very compartmented program, and not nearly on the scale of what they had going on in Afghanistan, because you don't have the size, the security, you don't have the ease of movement" that the Taliban government provided.

Chris Quillen, a former CIA analyst specializing in Al Qaeda's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, said the network's program in Pakistan could have made significant progress without authorities knowing about it by operating in small compounds, as it did in Afghanistan.

"I am not saying the programs are great and ready for an attack tomorrow," said Quillen, who left the agency in August 2006 and is now a U.S. government intelligence contractor. "But whatever they lost in the 2001 invasion, they are back to that level at this point."