Iran pushing for pro-Iranian as Laden successor

LONDON: Iran is pushing for a pro-Iranian activist within Al-Qaeda to take over from Osama bin Laden, a media report claimed on Tuesday.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to persuade the Al-Qaeda leadership to choose Saif al-Adel as its official number three, after Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, The Daily Telegraph said on Tuesday quoting western intelligence officials.

Al-Adel was formerly bin Laden's head of security, and was named on the FBI's 22 most wanted list after September 11 for his alleged involvement in terror attacks against US targets in Somalia and Africa in the 1990s.

The Iranians are trying to take advantage of bin Laden's declining health to promote senior officials who are known to be friendly to Tehran, the report claimed.

"This is an important power play by the Iranians and the prospect of Al-Qaeda and Iran forging a close alliance is truly terrifying," an unnamed Western intelligence official said.

Egyptian-born Adel, 46, has reportedly been living under house arrest in a Revolutionary Guards guest house in Tehran since fleeing there in late 2001 from Afghanistan following the US-led invasion of the country.

Adel is a former colonel in the Egyptian special forces who joined Al-Qaeda after fighting Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

He has been living in the guest house in the Iranian capital with two of bin Laden's sons, Saad and Mohammed, the report said.

The revelation will deal a major blow to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's hopes of establishing a "new partnership" with Tehran, the newspaper said.

Addressing the Lord Mayor's banquet in London last night - an occasion traditionally used by the Prime Minister to set out the Government's foreign policy - Blair said he wanted to launch a diplomatic initiative to secure peace in Iraq by establishing dialogue with Iran and ending threats of military force against the regime.

With the British and American governments looking for an exit strategy from Iraq, Blair admitted that they needed Iran's co-operation to prevent the country descending into civil war and to secure an overall Middle East peace settlement.

Alarm over Al-Qaeda deepened on Monday with a Foreign Office warning that the group was determined to acquire the technology to carry out a nuclear attack on the West.

A senior Foreign Office official said the terrorists were trawling the world for the materials and know-how to mount an attack using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

The official said, "We know that the aspiration is there, we know attempts to gather materials are there, we know that attempts to gather technologies are there."

The newspaper also reported that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are training Al-Qaeda fighters in facilities previously used by other Islamic militant groups, such as the Shiite militia Hezbollah.