Rashid Rauf, believed to be the mastermind of the London Airline Plot of 2006, has escaped from his Pakistani jailers following a court appearance in Islamabad on Sunday. A massive manhunt is alleged to be underway to find the young terrorist. "Two police officers who were accompanying [Rashid Rauf] at the time of his disappearance have been arrested and are being interrogated," police told told CNN.

In considering how terrorists and terror suspects are aided and abetting by authorities in lawless nations, one should recall convicted terrorist Jamal al-Badawi of Yemen. Al-Badawi was the mastermind behind the USS Cole bombing of 2000 in which 17 U.S. soldiers were killed. Al-Badawi was sentenced to death. Only he escaped from his Yemeni prison cell — not once, but twice.

After al-Badawi's second escape last year, he remained on the lam for some months before turning himself in October 2007. Al-Badawi then pledged his allegiance to the President of Yemen and was…pardoned. The Justice Department has been vague about its position on this (Al-Badawi was considered a fugative with a $5 million FBI bounty on this head) and the US continues to provide Yemen with $20 million in aid each year. This is nothing, of course, compared to the $80 million each month that goes to Pakistan. 

In considering how terrorists and terror suspects are aided and abetting by authorities in lawless nations such as Pakistan and Yemen, one should also recall Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. In January 2002, investigators working with Pearl's wife, Mariane Pearl, learned (thanks to a British journalist) that Omar Saeed Sheikh was likely behind the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. (Like Rashid Rauf, Omar Sheikh was a citizen of Britain; Rauf is also a citizen of Pakistan). A massive hunt for Sheikh began, until it was discovered that Sheikh had turned himself in to sympathetic Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agents and had already been in custody for a number of days. The theory is that those ISI agents wanted to protect Sheikh from revealing information were he to be captured and interrogated by Pakistani investigators who actually wanted to find Pearl alive. (To learn more about this, read Mariane Pearl's excellent book.)

In July 2002, Omar Sheikh was sentenced to death for abducting and murdering Daniel Pearl. He's appealed, but remains in prison. For now, anyway.

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