HE WAS the Pakistani equivalent to the Avon lady. A successful cosmetics salesman who travelled frequently on business, Rashid Rauf was above suspicion in his middle-class neighbourhood.

The man now regarded as one of the prime suspects in the alleged air terror plot moved into a smart area of Bahawalpur, in southern Punjab, just three months ago.

Like a social climbing yuppie he even gazumped a bidder for his new house by offering 200,000 rupees (£1,700) on top of the asking price. The £15,000 purchase allowed Rauf to rub shoulders with lawyers, doctors and other professionals in the dusty cotton town’s smartest neighbourhood.

Few in the area would have known that the seemingly successful businessman was also active in radical politics with impeccable family connections.

Certainly there was nothing to suggest, as is alleged, that he may have been one of the pivotal figures in an international terror plot to bring down up to nine transatlantic airliners.

This weekend a clearer picture was emerging of Rauf’s life in the four years after he left his home town of Birmingham to start a new life in Pakistan.

His arrest in Pakistan began an unprecedented manhunt in Britain with 25 young Muslims being hauled into custody by anti-terrorist police. Two have been released while the rest are still being questioned.

Intelligence officials in Pakistan have claimed that Rauf may be the pivotal figure linking senior Al-Qaeda figures in neighbouring Afghanistan to the alleged plotters in Britain.

Sources close to the investigation claim that the contact in Afghanistan may have been a son-in-law of Ayman al-Zawahiri, second-in-command to Osama Bin Laden.

Back in Britain, one of the common factors linking several of the alleged plotters is that they attended seminars run by Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic missionary group.

What is known about Rauf, the suspected linchpin? He moved to Pakistan as a 21-year-old following the murder of his uncle in Birmingham in 2002. He had apparently prospered, marrying into a family that was the nearest thing Bahawalpur has to royalty.

His wife is the daughter of Ghulam Mustafa, who founded the radical madrasah, Darul Uloom Madina, in 1965. It is one of Pakistan’s most controversial fundamentalist seminaries, teaching the Deobandi Muslim philosophy — espoused by Bin Laden — to more than 1,000 boys at a time.

When Rauf became Mustafa’s son-in-law, one of Pakistan’s top terrorists, Masood Azhar, became his brother- in-law. Azhar had been jailed in India for leading terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir in the 1990s. But he was released in 1999 after his colleagues hijacked an Indian Airlines jet to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

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