Counter-terrorism police in Pakistan have arrested a former Afghan bodyguard of the late al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, officials said on Friday.

Aminul Haq, who once headed Mr bin Laden’s elite security unit, was arrested in the city of Gujrat, said Usman Akram Gondal of the counter-terrorism police.

Mr Haq’s name is on the United Nations’ list of global terrorists, and he was previously arrested in Pakistan in 2007, Mr Gondal said.

He went into hiding after he was released from a Pakistani jail in 2011 and reappeared in the Afghan region of Nangarhar in 2021 after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.

Mr Gondal said Mr Haq recently entered Pakistan and that the purpose of his visit was being investigated.

The al-Qaeda leader carried Afghan and fake Pakistani identity documents that he used to travel with, the officer said.

Mr Gondal said the counter-terrorism police raided the compound he was staying in on an intelligence tip suggesting his presence in the Gujrat area.

Mr Haq is the first high-profile al-Qaeda figure who has been arrested in Pakistan since the fall of neighbouring Afghanistan to the Taliban.

U.S. forces killed Mr bin Laden in his residential compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad in a raid in 2011.

Several Arab, Afghan and Pakistani al-Qaeda leaders were killed in the country in U.S. drone strikes in subsequent years, resulting in the weakening of the once formidable global terror network.

The group has been seeking a resurgence in the region since Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, according to recent UN reports.

(dpa/NAN)a