Iraqi forces claimed tonight to have arrested the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq during an operation in the northern city of Mosul, one of the terrorist organisation’s last major hold-outs in the country.

Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the nom de guerre of Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, was captured in a joint US-Iraqi operation, according to Iraqi military sources quoted by the Arabic news channel al-Arabiya. The US military said it could not confirm the information.

Al-Masri’s death was reported by the Iraqi military last year and later proved to be wrong.

Al-Masri, whose nickname literally means “the Egyptian”, took command of Al-Qaeda in Iraq after the US military killed his blood-stained predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian ex-criminal turned Islamic fundamentalist. Al-Zarqawi, believed to have personally beheaded British hostage Kenneth Bigley in 2004, was killed in a US air strike on his hide-out in June 2006.

The US military put a five million dollar bounty on al-Masri’s head, who in 2007 he went on to become the “war minister” of the Sunni extremist Islamic State of Iraq, an attempt to re-establish the medieval Islamic caliphate in central provinces of Iraq where al-Qaeda and their local allies ran a mini empire of terror, torture and murder.

The Egyptian militant is believed to have met al-Zarqawi in an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan some time in 2001, while lecturing and training other Mujahedin. He had turned to religious violence in 1982 when he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later joined forces with Osama bin Laden and became his right-hand man.

An expert in explosives and the manufacture of the car and truck bombs that have done so much to stoke civil war between Sunni and Shia communities in Iraq, al-Masri has also urged his supporters to kidnap Western contractors who could be exchanged for the release of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric who was jailed in the United States in 1995 for plotting terror attacks on US landmarks.

US and Iraqi forces have been waging a protracted battle for control of Mosul for months. Sunni extremists have moved there after the so-called Sunni Awakening — the turning of indigenous Iraqi resistance fighters against their former Al Qaeda allies - forced the extremists out of their bastions in the western desert, Baghdad and the province of Diyala, where some of the fiercest fighting of the US surge took place last year.

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