operative for political reasons, i.e. in order to bolster claims of terrorist threats in August 2004 and win support in the upcoming election. This view was supported by anonymous Pakistani sources; according to Reuters, U.S. officials providing justification for anti-terrorism alerts revealed details about a Pakistani secret agent, and confirmed his name while he was working under cover in a sting operation, Pakistani sources said on Friday. A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al Qaeda operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers. Writing for Salon.com, however, Husain Haqqani countered this view, reporting that <blockquote>in fact, U.S. officials did not leak Khan's name. The first leak of Khan's name, according to well-informed, reliable sources in the region who spoke on condition of anonymity, came from Pakistani officials in Islamabad – who perhaps were motivated by eagerness to show off their success in arresting al-Qaida figures or, more ominously, by a desire to sabotage the penetration of al-Qaida that Khan's arrest had made possible. A second Pakistani leak to Reuters, blaming the Americans as the source of the leak, served to absolve the Pakistanis of any responsibility in breaking up new al-Qaida cells – an important move domestically. Most analysts agreed that, regardless of who had leaked Khan's identity, the leak had been premature and had compromised the success of the intelligence operation. Following the publication of Khan's name, British authorities moved quickly to arrest 13 members of the British terrorist cell with which Khan had been communicating (the so-called Luton cell). By the evening of 9 August, two of the suspects had been released from custody, and the interviews of two others had been called off. An additional five suspects were reported as having escaped the British raids. Some of those who still maintained that the Bush administration had leaked Khan's name went on to link the incident to the leak of Valerie Plame's name as denoting a pattern of compromising intelligence operatives for political gain. Aside from individuals, blogs, and online petitions, these included other sources, such as The Village Voice, The Advocate Weekly Newspapers, Scoop, and The Democratic Policy Committee. Sajeel Shahid, a British Muslim widely described as a founder or leader of an organization of British Muslims who supported or engaged in Jihad, said he