Terrorist outfit Al Qaeda is training a 12-member team of westerners in Pakistan for a special mission including plotting attacks on return to their home countries, a media report has said.
The team includes nine British citizens, two Norwegian Muslims and an Australian, the Newsweek said quoting Taliban's chief Al Qaeda liaison for Ghazni province in Afghanistan Omar Farooqi.
The magazine in its upcoming issue said some Taliban commanders told of seeing the "English brothers," as foreign recruits are called, in person during the training.
Farooqi said he spent roughly five weeks last year helping indoctrinate and train a class of foreign recruits near Afghanistan border in tribal Waziristan.
Their mission, Farooqi said, will be to act as underground organisers and operatives for Al Qaeda in their home countries -- and their year-long training course is just about finished.
He said the westerners were not meant to be suicide bombers themselves as they are far too valuable to waste.
The magazine quotes US and British security agencies as saying they have known this threat would come sooner or later.
While saying he could not confirm the English brothers' case specifically, a spokesman for Britan's Foreign Office called it "common knowledge" that jihadi recruits have been travelling from Britain to Pakistan for indoctrination and training.
US intelligence officials told Newsweek that their people were definitely concerned about terror suspects and operatives shuttling back and forth between Britain and Pakistan.
"For the most effective background checks on passengers, the United States needs information and assistance from the country where the traveller resides," says Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke, adding that such help should be "routine".
Newsweek said Farooqi confidently described those plans to its correspondent at a mud-brick house in Afghanistan's Paktia province, not far from the Pakistan border.
The specifics of his story could not be independently corroborated, the report said.
The magazine said an open notebook lay on the carpet where Farooqi was seated, and the correspondent caught a fleeting glimpse of scrawled names and telephone numbers, including several that were preceded by UK's code: 44.
Farooqi told the magazine that he first met the brothers, all of them in their 20s, soon after they reached Waziristan
in October 2005.
A few, he couldn't say how many, had arrived in Pakistan by air, but most had taken a clandestine overland route, across Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan.
According to Farooqi, the brothers' travel arrangements were made by Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, one of Al Qaeda's top operations men and a liaison with insurgents in Iraq.
The transcontinental journey took a month to complete, but Farooqi claimed the brothers left no official traces of their passage, slipping past every border-control post without showing any travel documents.
Still, Al Qaeda, Newsweek said, wasn't taking any chances with the English brothers' safety. They received much of their training behind the mud-brick walls of the sprawling compounds that are typical of Pakistan's tribal areas.
The idea was to keep the men hidden from US and Pakistani reconnaissance planes.
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