Pakistani students shout anti-US slogans during a demonstration in Peshawar on Thursday against the cross-border NATO airstrike on Pakistani troops. Pakistan said it could not attend the Bonn conference unless its security was ensured, appearing to set a condition after Washington led calls on Islamabad to reconsider a boycott. A. Majeed / Agence France-Presse

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri claims that the terror group is holding hostage a US development worker kidnapped in Pakistan four months ago, according to an online statement seen by monitors.

Warren Weinstein, 70, country director for US-based consultancy J.E. Austin Associates, was snatched after gunmen tricked their way into his home on Aug 13, days before he was due to return to the United States.

Zawahiri claimed responsibility and demanded that Washington end airstrikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and release the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and relatives of Osama bin Laden, to secure Weinstein's release.

"Just as the Americans detain all whom they suspect of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban, even remotely, we detained this man who has been neck-deep in American aid to Pakistan since the 1970s," the SITE Intelligence Group quoted Zawahiri as saying in a 31-minute video sent to jihadist forums.

The video showed no proof of life for Weinstein, but the message appears to be the first significant lead in the case in weeks.

A spokeswoman for the US embassy in Islamabad said officials there had seen the statement. "Investigations are still ongoing. We're in regular contact with the family," she said.

Pakistani government officials were not immediately reachable for comment, but police handling the case in the eastern city of Lahore, where Weinstein was snatched, said they were unaware of al-Qaida's claim.

"So far nobody has contacted us, nor given any demands," said senior police official Ali Aamir Malik, who is supervising investigations.

"We do not have proof of life of the US national who had been kidnapped."

Zawahiri, who took over as leader after Bin Laden was killed by US commandos in Pakistan in May, also said his No 2, Atiyah abd al-Rahman, was killed in a US airstrike in Waziristan in Pakistan's tribal northwest in August.

"The retaliation, with permission from Allah, will be taken against those crusader Westerners who killed him and his two sons, and killed hundreds of thousands of our brothers, sons, women, and sheikhs, and occupied our countries (and) looted our wealth," he said.

US officials announced Rahman's death in August but did not provide details.

A claim of a hostage-taking by al-Qaida's core structure is seen as rare; such claims by offshoots are far more common.

In January 2002, al-Qaida-linked groups kidnapped and beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl, who worked for the Wall Street Journal, in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi.

Among the list of eight demands in exchange for Weinstein, al-Qaida called for the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdul Rahman, Ramzi Yousef and Sayyid Nosair, who are tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Agence France-Presse

(China Daily 12/03/2011 page8)