Al Qaeda's No 2 urges Pakistan coup

Arabic television Al Jazeera yesterday aired a purported new tape by senior al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri in which he called on Pakistanis to overthrow "traitor" President Pervez Musharraf's government.

"I call on Muslims in Pakistan to get rid of their government which is working for Americans," said the voice on the tape, which sounded like previous recordings for Zawahri, right-hand man of Osama bin Laden.

"Musharraf wants to stab the Muslim Jihad (holy struggle) uprising in Afghanistan in the back. The Pakistani people had offered a helping hand to their brothers in Afghanistan, that's why Americans delegated President Musharraf to take revenge on the tribes along the border, especially the Pashtun."

Pakistan, a key US ally in the "war on terror", has been waging a bloody campaign over the last fortnight to root out al Qaeda fighters on its Afghan border in tandem with a US sweep on the other side of the frontier.

Pakistani officials said last week fierce resistance suggested militants were protecting a "high-value target", perhaps Zawahri - but the military later said that was unfounded "guesswork".

President Musharraf narrowly escaped two assassination attempts in December blamed on Muslim militants.

He faced strong opposition demands yesterday to stop the offensive by some 5,000 troops in the lawless South Waziristan tribal region, but officials said it would go on until all militants were eliminated.

Scores of people have been killed. Pashtun tribes inhabit both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

"The CIA is reviewing the tape in an effort to determine whether it is authentic," a US intelligence official told Reuters in Washington.

The CIA has determined that two tapes broadcast on Arab television in February were "probably Zawahri" - who it believes played a key role in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In those tapes, he accused France of "Crusader hatred" towards Islam by banning Muslim headscarves from state classrooms and threatened more attacks against the US.

On the new tape, the speaker called Musharraf "the traitor". "Pakistan is targeted mainly because Americans don't want it to be a nuclear power in Asia because it is Muslim," he said.

He said Musharraf had plans, including "strangling the Jihad (holy struggle) in Kashmir" - the majority Muslim state disputed between India and Pakistan - by gradually abandoning the right of Kashmiri independence and paralysing Pakistan nuclear capabilities.