Guardian report.

Pakistani intelligence officials today denied that an American militant suspect arrested in Karachi was al-Qaida's US-born spokesman.

Yesterday two intelligence officers and a senior government official identified the detained man as Adam Gadahn, a 31-year-old California-born convert to Islam who has appeared on videos threatening the west, including one that emerged earlier the same day.

But a senior government official and two security agents said today the suspect was not Gadahn.

Laura Rozen on Politico.

[...] one reason UAE authorities are so ticked off about the assassination is because they were quietly cooperating with Israel on Iran intelligence. Indeed, an Israeli minister was in the UAE the day the assassination took place.

Reuters article.

Iran's accusations that Jundollah operated from bases in Pakistan's Baluchistan province have been a cause of friction with Islamabad and Rigi's arrest -- in circumstances yet to be fully explained -- could go some way to easing tensions.

Pakistan and Iran, which have also competed for influence in Afghanistan, have been trying to improve relations recently as regional players prepare for U.S.-led forces to start withdrawing in 2011.

Editorial in the New York Times.

The cumulative weight of the evidence seems persuasive. But the F.B.I. has a troubling history of building a circumstantial case against suspects who are later exonerated. We are inclined to agree with Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who is calling for an independent assessment to validate the findings. Americans need to be sure that the real culprit or possible accomplices are not still at large, waiting to do damage again. And we need to head off conspiracy theories that are apt to be fostered if the only judgment available comes from an agency eager to clear its books.

PressTV report.

The captured ringleader of the Jundallah terrorist group, Abdolmalek Rigi, was scheduled to meet US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke at the Manas Air Base for talks on waging an insurgency against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a journalist says.

Rigi had planned to meet a high-profile US official at the Manas Air Base near Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek.

This senior US official must have been Holbrooke, who was in Kyrgyzstan to visit the only US air base in Central Asia, the IRNA news agency quoted journalist Wayne Madsen as saying on Saturday.

Guardian report.

India tonight reacted angrily to the attack. Officials in New Delhi are convinced a series of previous such strikes -- the Indian embassy was targeted in both 2008 and in 2009 -- were the work of militants sponsored by Pakistan. Islamabad has always denied any connections to militants operating in Afghanistan.

From the Nation (Pakistan).

THE arrest by Iran of Abdolmalek Rigi, the ringleader of the much feared Jundullah, while he was on his way to Kyrgyzstan from Dubai is a highly significant development. Available evidence, the Iranians claim, suggests that he was being backed by the United States to destabilise Iran. Jundullah is reported to have carried out a number of deadly terrorist attacks on the Iranian soil. The latest one was the bomb blast on October 18 that killed 42 people including the Chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other tribal leaders. The group took credit for the attack. The Iranian Interior Minister has confirmed that they are in possession of evidence which shows that Rigi was hand in glove with the US and UK to foment unrest in the country. They allege that he has an Afghan passport and had met with the NATO chief leaving no doubt of the US backing him up. Tehran also maintains that hours before his arrest, he was present in a US military base in Afghanistan. The Iranian charges seem to have an element of truth. Even US analyst Seymour Hersh had, in the past, hinted at the possibility of the Bush regime in cahoots with Jundullah to create trouble in Iran.

PressTV's report on the capture of Rigi.

Iran's security officers grounded the plane carrying the ringleader of Jundullah terrorist group Abdolmalek Rigi in one of Iran's southern ports, informed sources say.

As initial reports indicated that Iran's most wanted man was captured on a flight en-route to Kyrgyzstan from Dubai, a source talking to Press TV on condition of anonymity confirmed that Rigi and one of his deputies were captured after their plane was brought down by security forces in an airport in the Iranian Persian Gulf city of Bandar Abbas.

Iran's intelligence minister says the leader of Jundallah terrorist group was at a US base in Afghanistan 24 hours before his capture, in possession of a US-issued, forged Afghan passport.

New York Times article.

Several hundred other scientists over the years have had access to the material in that particular flask, but according to the F.B.I., all of them except for Mr. Ivins were exonerated. Mr. Ivins committed suicide two years ago just as prosecutors were moving to indict him -- an act that seems, under the circumstances, to be highly incriminating.

And yet, when you look a bit closer at the F.B.I.'s report, doubts persist, and they lend a good deal of credibility to the arguments of those, including some of Mr. Ivins's former colleagues, that the F.B.I.'s case, as Representative Rush D. Holt of New Jersey put it last week, is "barely circumstantial."

From the Frederick News Post.

Jeffrey Adamovicz, former chief of bacteriology who supervised Ivins' work at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, said he found little new information in the FBI's final report.

"The evidence is still very circumstantial and unconvincing as a whole," Adamovicz wrote in an e-mail. "I'm curious as to why they closed the case while the (National Academy of Science) review is still ongoing. Is it because the review is going unfavorable for the FBI?"

BBC report.

Iranian authorities have arrested the leader of the Sunni Muslim militant group Jundullah, according to reports on state television.

The Arabic language al-Alam channel said Abdolmalek Rigi had been held in eastern Iran, but gave no more details.

Cryptome carries Meryl Nass's response to the FBI's closing of the Anthrax case. Her blog is here.

The FBI's report, documents and accompanying information (only pertaining to Ivins, not to the rest of the investigation) were released on Friday afternoon ... which means the FBI anticipated doubt and ridicule. The National Academies of Science (NAS) is several months away from issuing its $879,550 report on the microbial forensics, suggesting a) asking NAS to investigate the FBI's science was just a charade to placate Congress, and/or b) NAS' investigation might be uncovering things the FBI would prefer to bury, so FBI decided to preempt the NAS panel's report.

Craig Murray writes.

If you missed the broadcast of David Tennant in David Hare's adaptation of Murder in Samarkand, or if you just want to hear it again, it is available for the next seven days here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qs5x7.

Times report.

The anthrax attacks that shocked America in 2001 were the work of a seriously disturbed government scientist who once called himself "Crazy Bruce" and who was obsessed with blindfolded women, according to the FBI's investigation's final report on the case.

Nineteen months after the suicide of Bruce Ivins, the biodefence researcher who was about to be charged with sending out a series of anthrax-laced letters that killed five people, the FBI has released new evidence that portrayed the 62-year-old scientist as psychologically fragile and apparently losing his grip on reality.

Daily Mail report.

MI6 was tipped off that Israeli agents were going to carry out an 'overseas operation' using fake British passports, it was claimed last night.

A member of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, said the Foreign Office was also told hours before a Hamas terrorist chief was assassinated in Dubai.

The tip-off did not say who the target would be or even where the hit squad would be in action.

But the claim from a credible source that the Government had some prior knowledge of the abuse of UK passports will strengthen calls for ministers to come clean about what they knew and when.

Robert Fisk in the Independent.

Collusion. That's what it's all about. The United Arab Emirates suspect -- only suspect, mark you -- that Europe's "security collaboration" with Israel has crossed a line into illegality, where British passports (and those of other other EU nations) can now be used to send Israeli agents into the Gulf to kill Israel's enemies.