World's most wanted: the new faces of terror

Who is the world's most wanted terrorist? For most of the past 30 years – until he was surpassed in infamy by Osama bin Laden – that title would have gone to Abu Nidal, at least in Israeli and American eyes.

According to the Iraqi security service last week, Abu Nidal shot himself when agents arrived to arrest him for entering Iraq illegally in 1999. In the quarter-century before Mr bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network bombed the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998, the Palestinian was the most successful attacker of Western targets.

His career stretched from the kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 to (he sometimes claimed) the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie. Abu Nidal had been inactive for over a decade at the time of his death, however, and the FBI's "most wanted terrorists" list shows how the perceived threat to America has changed. Not one of the 22 men it names is Palestinian, and none has any direct connection to the conflict in Israel and the occupied territories.

The largest number, seven, were born in Egypt; five, including the FBI's top target, Mr bin Laden, are from Saudi Arabia. Apart from three members of Lebanon's Hizbollah movement accused of a 1985 hijacking in which an American was killed, all are wanted in connection with attacks, planned or actual, attributed to al-Qa'ida.

Those include the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military complex in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 American servicemen died, and a 1995 plot in Manila to place bombs on airliners crossing the Pacific. Most of the 22, however, have been indicted in the US for the east African embassy bombings. The list does not specifically mention last autumn's attacks, although it calls Mr bin Laden "a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world".

So far only one man, Zacarias Moussaoui, has been indicted for 11 September. US prosecutors say that if he had not already been in custody on immigration charges, he would have been the 20th hijacker that day.

The Manila plot revealed links between al-Qa'ida and the murderous Abu Sayyaf group, led by Khadafi Janjalani, which beheaded two Jehovah's Witnesses in the southern Philippines last week. The network may recently have lost allies elsewhere: Khattab, a Palestinian who commanded Afghan-trained fighters in Chechnya, and Rachid Abou Tourab, leader of the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, are both claimed by the local authorities to be dead.

But is Osama bin Laden himself alive? As the silence lengthens, it seems increasingly possible that the American assault on the Tora Bora cave complex last December might have killed him. In that case, the FBI would probably pass on to Muhammad Atef, his deputy and presumed successor, or Ayman al-Zawahiri, another Egyptian who founded the Islamic Jihad movement in his own country before becoming the al-Qai'da leader's closest adviser. Both were with him in Afghanistan.

Nothing has been heard of them either, however, and the title of "most wanted" may be awaiting a suitable candidate.