[Crvena zvezda]

Bulgaria Denies Claim of Al-Qaeda No. 2 Visit
March 21, 2004
BG
Sofia refuted media claims that Al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has visited Bulgaria.

Bulgaria's Foreign Ministry has no information about a visit of Ayman al-Zawahiri to Bulgaria, the ministry spokesman Lyubomir Todorov said on Saturday.

He reacted to Birmingham Post-Herald reports that Ayman al-Zawahiri travelled to Bulgaria among other countries on Islamic Jihad business and under an assumed name.

According to the article Zawahiri visited Switzerland, Bosnia, Bulgaria and the Russian province of Dagestan and even made surreptitious fund-raising swings through Texas, California and New York in the 1990s.

In 1998, Zawahiri and bin Laden officially aligned, and al-Qaeda was born.

In a separate development Ayman al-Zawahiri biographer, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, announced that Zawahiri visited New Zealand and Australia in 1996 to recruit militants.

In those days, in early 1996, he was on a mission to organise his network all over the world, Mir said.

The claims come as Pakistani officials said the previous day they might have cornered al-Zawahiri in a remote area near the Afghan border after two days of intense fighting.

On Saturday Pakistan's military arrested more than 100 suspects in a five-day assault on militants holed up in mud fortresses along the border where Ayman al Zawahri is believed trapped.