KABUL - The arrest of Al-Qaeda commander Abd al Hadi al-Iraqi, who worked with Afghanistan's Taliban, is a major success and will be a blow to terror networks, the Afghan defence ministry said Friday.
"Al-Iraqi was very important for the terrorists' networks. His arrest is a major success," ministry spokesman Mohammad Zahir Azimi told AFP.
"It will help to get to the high-ranking terrorist network figures and it will have deeply negative effect on the network," he said.
A Pentagon spokesman said the militant, on a US "most wanted" list, had been taken into US custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in the past week.
He declined to comment on when and where al-Iraqi was captured or whether US forces were directly involved in the capture.
The Al-Qaeda commander has worked directly with the Taliban and was also involved in plots to assassinate Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, the spokesman said.
The militant, said to be close to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, is reported to have commanded militant training camps in Afghanistan.
The US-led coalition, which has led counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan since overthrowing the Taliban government in 2001 for sheltering Al-Qaeda, confirmed the arrest but referred all queries to Washington.
04/27/2007 16:53 GMT