Karachi, Pakistan ? Security forces on Sunday killed a Pakistani fugitive accused of organizing the kidnapping and killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 and carrying out two unsuccessful attempts on the life of Pakistan’s president late last year, according to senior police and military officials.

Officials said Amjad Hussain Farooqi, described as Pakistan’s most wanted man and an associate of the al-Qaida network, died during a two-hour gun battle in Nawabshah, a town in the southern province of Sindh. Two other men were arrested in the raid, which was carried out by a special military team formed in March to track down Farooqi after he was determined to be behind attempts to kill the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in December.

Pakistani intelligence officials said Farooqi was the leader of a band of Pakistani Islamic militants who worked closely with Abu Feraj Libi, a Libyan-born al-Qaida lieutenant closely linked to Ayman Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s closest aide. “Abu Feraj arranged money for Amjad Farooqi as he made plans to kill the president,” said Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao.

Aftab Sherpao said his government “can say with full confidence that Farooqi was the chief al-Qaida contact in Pakistan.”

A member of Lashkar-i-Jangvi, a violent Sunni Muslim organization responsible for numerous attacks on Pakistani Shiites, Farooqi was one of the hijackers who commandeered an Indian Airlines plane in December 1999 and ordered it flown to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. The hijacking ended with the plane’s passengers and crew being swapped for four men held in Indian prisons — including Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who later was convicted and sentenced to hang for the kidnapping and murder of Pearl, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal.

Pakistani investigators recently said Farooqi helped force Pearl into a vehicle when he was kidnapped in Karachi on the night of Jan. 23, 2002, and was present when Pearl was beheaded.

“The gruesome murder of Pearl and its video filming for the world was the work of Amjad Farooqi (and) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” said a senior Pakistani intelligence official who didn’t want to be identified. Mohammed, the former al-Qaida operations chief who is believed to have been the mastermind of Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, has been described by U.S. authorities as the person who decapitated Pearl. Mohammed was apprehended in Pakistan in March 2003 and is in U.S. custody.