Terror group demands halt to US strikes on Afghanistan and Pakistan and prisoner exchange for release of Warren Weinstein
Al-Qaida says it is holding a 70-year-old American aid worker abducted in Pakistan three months ago.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaida leader, said in a video that Warren Weinstein, who was kidnapped by armed men in Lahore, would be freed only if the US ceases its air strikes on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and frees prisoners.
"Just as the Americans detain whomever they suspect may be connected to al-Qaida or the Taliban even in the slightest of ways, we have detained this man who has been involved with US aid to Pakistan since the 1970s," Zawahiri said.
Weinstein, a development expert, has lived in Pakistan for seven years and headed the office of an American contractor working for the US government's agency for international development to enhance Pakistan's dairy and gem trades.
Zawahiri said: "I tell the captive soldiers of al-Qaida and the Taliban and our female prisoners held in the prisons of the crusaders and their collaborators, we have not forgotten you and in order to free you we have taken hostage the Jewish American Warren Weinstein."
The video offered no evidence the aid worker is still alive.
In an audio recording issued on Islamist websites late on Thursday , Zawahiri also claimed a senior al-Qaida leader based in Pakistan known as Attiyatullah had been killed in a US air strike in August.
Weinstein was kidnapped just days before he was to leave the country by men who persuaded the guards on his house to open the gate by saying they wanted to give them food, a religious gesture during Ramadan. The attackers beat the guards and then grabbed the American from his bedroom. The police held the security guards for weeks on suspicion they were involved.
It is not clear if Weinstein was snatched by members of al-Qaida or taken for ransom and then passed or sold to the terrorist group.
Zawahiri's demand for an end to the American air strikes is likely to sit well with many Pakistanis, coming just days after a US-led Nato attack killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the border with Afghanistan.
The deaths have angered many Pakistanis and drawn an unusually sharp response from the government in Islamabad. There was already simmering anger over the deaths of civilians in US drone attacks aimed at alleged terrorists inside Pakistan and over an incident in February in which a CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, shot dead two men on the street in Lahore he said were trying to rob him.
Given that Washington is unlikely to halt its air raids, Weinstein's fate is uncertain.
In the video Zawahiri identified Weinstein as Jewish.
In 2002, a Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was abducted in Karachi and beheaded. His kidnappers snatched him because he was American, but his Jewish identity was used to justify his murder.