UNDERCOVER FBI agents have arrested four senior al-Qaeda members in armed raids in Pakistan and Germany.

The first two arrests came after a gun battle in a residential suburb of Karachi, when an al-Qaeda gang hurled grenades at FBI officers and Pakistani police and used children as human shields to try to escape.

Inside their flat, the FBI found a cache of weapons, street maps marked with locations for likely terror attacks and more than $32,000.

One of the two men arrested is believed to have been the chief of staff for Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al- Zawahiri. Police have named him as Abu Umar. He was travelling on an Egyptian passport with a Yemeni who has been identified as Abu Hamza.

The FBI believes that Abu Umar helped to organise al-Qaeda’s terrorist network while he was based in Sudan.A third suspect in the flat escaped.

The second arrests were made at a hotel room in Frankfurt’s international airport, where the two men inside gave up without a fight.

Police believe that they were in transit from their homes in Yemen to another European city. US intelligence had been trailing one of the men — Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Mohad — for months.

He is an imam at a radical mosque in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, but German intelligence sources described him as one of the main finance chiefs for al-Qaeda.

One of six Yemeni-American men, charged by the US with supporting terrorism, pleaded guilty last night at a court in Buffalo, New York, to providing material support to al-Qaeda. Faysal Galab faces a ten-year jail sentence.

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