Terrorism Notebook
Powell says terror report "mistake," not cover-up

AP Paul Johnson is shown with his wife, Noon, in a family photo. Islamic rebels in Saudi Arabia claim to have abducted Johnson.

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Powell said during appearances on Sunday talk shows that the State Department was working with the CIA to determine what went wrong.

"It's a numbers error," Powell said on ABC's "This Week." "It's not a political judgment that said, 'Let's see if we can cook the books.' We can't get away with that now."

The "Patterns of Global Terrorism Report," released in April, had claimed the number of terrorist incidents worldwide had dropped last year to 190, which would have been the lowest level in more than three decades and a decline of 45 percent since President Bush took office in 2001.

But State Department officials conceded last week that the report was in error, in part because it omitted acts of terrorism after Nov. 11, 2003 — including a suicide bombing in Istanbul that killed 61 and injured more than 300.

Search continues for abducted American

LONDON — The three Americans killed or kidnapped by Islamic radicals in Saudi Arabia in the past week had one thing in common: They worked for U.S. military contractors.

Authorities continued to search yesterday for the kidnapped American, Paul M. Johnson Jr., 55, an employee of Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin Corp.

A group calling itself Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula issued a statement Saturday saying it had captured Johnson and said Johnson was one of four experts in Saudi Arabia on the Apache attack helicopters used by the U.S. military elsewhere in the Middle East.

Americans Kenneth Scroggs and Robert Jacobs were shot to death earlier.

10 al-Qaida suspects arrested in Karachi
 
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani authorities have arrested 10 suspected al-Qaida members, including a nephew of detained terror mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has been in U.S. custody the past year, the interior minister said yesterday.

The men were arrested over the weekend in separate raids in the southern port city of Karachi, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said.

Among them was Masrab Arochi, a nephew of Mohammed, the No. 3 person in al-Qaida, who was captured in March 2003. Arochi had a $1 million bounty on his head, Hayat said, and is believed to have been behind several attacks in Pakistan.

Police briefly held embassy-bomb suspect

MOMBASA, Kenya — Police had one of the FBI's most-wanted al-Qaida terrorists behind bars for a night but did not realize who he was, then allowed him to escape, The Associated Press reported yesterday.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed had been indicted for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa and had a $25 million bounty on his head when he was picked up on July 12, 2002, in connection with an armed robbery in this Indian Ocean port.

But police, who had arrested him for using a credit card taken in a robbery, took him to what they believed was his apartment in search of stolen goods. Amid the confusion, Mohammed — who was not handcuffed — fled out the door and disappeared.

Just months after his brush with jail, Mohammed allegedly masterminded al-Qaida attacks in Kenya on Nov. 28, 2002.

In one, attackers rammed a sport-utility vehicle full of explosives into an Israeli-owned hotel on Kenya's coast, killing 15 people. Separately, two surface-to-air missiles narrowly missed an Israeli-owned airliner as it took off from Mombasa.