Is liquid bomb mastermind Rashid Rauf dead or alive

Rashid Rauf is the reason we're not allowed to go through airport security with a bottle of water. The hooded, long-nosed extremist was the mastermind behind the plot to use Lucozade bottles and batteries to blow up at least seven planes flying across the Atlantic, for which three men were convicted at Woolwich Crown Court on Monday. Had Rauf's plan succeeded, 18 suicide bombers might have killed 5,000 people.

A leading go-between for young, angry British Muslims and the terrorist network al-Qaeda, Rauf was also linked to the 2004 attempt to blow up London nightclubs with explosive fertiliser, to the murders of 52 people in the 7/7 bombings in 2005, and to the failed attempts to bomb London again a fortnight later.

The son of a devout Birmingham baker who came over to England from rural Pakistan in the 1980s, Rauf spent his late teenage years working early morning shifts delivering buns and muffins to the city’s grocers for his father’s business, often visiting his local mosque at five in the morning before work.

‘Dick Cheney would have had Rauf’s skull on his desk if he could’

Rauf went to Portsmouth University in 1999 but never graduated. It is thought that, increasingly seduced by the allure of militant Islam, he may have repeatedly stabbed his uncle, Mohammed Saeed, to death after an argument over his radicalisation, or an arranged marriage, in April 2002.

Wanted by West Midlands police to answer questions about the murder, Rauf fled before they could find him. He fetched up in Bahawalpur, a small town in the Pakistani Punjab, with an iman who'd stayed at his house in Birmingham. Rauf changed his first name to Khalid, bought a nice house in a professional part of town, and, apparently, found work selling either refrigerators or cosmetics.

He married the iman's daughter, with whom he had two girls, and then fell in with one of her relatives, a man called Maulana Masood Azhar. He was the mastermind of a group called Jaish-e-Mohammed, or the Army of Mohammed, which had fought against India in Kashmir, and later turned its attention to Western targets. They were thought to have been involved in the horrific, videotaped execution of US journalist Daniel Pearl.

Despite his initial lack of fluency in Urdu, Rauf, who was still in his mid-twenties, made contact with some of Pakistan's murkiest and most dangerous jihadists, and became a well-connected facilitator between al-Qaeda and disaffected British Muslims. Three of the men he helped - Abdullah Ahmed Ali, Tanvir Hussain and Assad Sarwar - were convicted on Monday of the liquid bomb plot.

It was this plot which British police were still investigating in August 2006 when, in a rash move which might have botched the investigation, the Americans, allegedly under orders from Dick Cheney, told the Pakistanis to arrest Rauf. Although the British had yet to gather all the necessary evidence against the plotters - some of them had still to acquire airline tickets and passports – the Americans feared that another 9/11 was unfolding and wanted the mastermind in custody.

Rauf was duly picked up by members of the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, while he was travelling on a bus near Bahawalpur. A man who shared a prison cell with him several months later told the Guardian that Rauf had recounted to him the circumstances of his arrest. He made the mistake of using a particular phone to call Britain for the first time in several weeks, and the call was interrupted by a woman's voice asking in English whether he was Rashid Rauf. Moments later, the ISI agents stopped the bus.

While held in Pakistan, Rauf said that he was beaten, given electric shock treatment, moved from prison to prison and at one stage kept in a cell so small that his knees would touch the ceiling when he was lying down. He said that some of his interrogators had British and American accents. "He had a hood over his head but he knows what an English accent sounds like", Rauf's brother, Tayib Rauf, said.

Two former cellmates have supported this. The man who spoke to the Guardian about Rauf's arrest and another man who was imprisoned with Rauf near Rawalpindi told the Guardian they had seen long weals across his torso.

According to a former British intelligence officer speaking to the new York-based Human Rights Watch, the torture of Rauf was a "disaster": the scale of his injuries meant there was no point attempting to prosecute him in Britain.

No formal extradition request was ever made and Rauf was cleared of serious terrorism charges when he appeared in court in Pakistan. Rauf’s grandmother insisted that he was innocent, telling the BBC: "He is a humane and God-fearing person, obedient and punctual at prayers. Even a cat would scare him and he would not even crush an ant under his feet."

Mystery surrounds Rauf's disappearance in December 2007. On the day of a court hearing in Islamabad, he was accompanied by two guards to a mosque. When he went in for afternoon prayers, they popped into a nearby McDonalds and Rauf has not been seen since.

Many believe that he escaped, freeing himself from his handcuffs and jumping over the mosque's wall into open fields, perhaps with the help of policemen with Islamist sympathies. But his family think Rauf was kidnapped by the ISI, and possibly tortured to death. "It wasn't an escape from custody. You could call it a 'mysterious disappearance' if you like, but not an escape," Rauf's lawyer, Hashmat Ali Habib suggested in an interview with the Guardian. "Perhaps it will be announced that Rashid was caught in crossfire during a police operation."‘There is nothing definitely to say Rauf is actually dead’Nearly a year after his disappearance in Islamabad he was reported killed by the CIA, who, with the help of pilots working in the Nevada desert, directed a heavy barrage of Predator drone missiles onto a mud-built bungalow in North Waziristan on November 22, 2008.

However, neither his body, nor any DNA, has ever been produced, and there are fears that Rauf could still be alive, hiding out in lawless Waziristan. In April, the Times reported a "senior Western intelligence official" saying: "There is nothing definitely to say he's actually dead. It may take a long time to find out. We honestly don't know."

The British intelligence analyst Crispin Black told The First Post on Tuesday: "The word in intelligence circles is that Rauf was killed by the drone. But there is no proof, no DNA, and it must be a nagging worry for the security services here and in the US that his body has not been produced.

"There would be no reason for the CIA or MI6 to hide his death if they were confident about it. You can be sure that Dick Cheney would have had his skull on his desk if he could."

It was also reported by various Indian and Pakistani newspapers earlier this month that, according to sources in Islamabad, Rashid Rauf is listed on the Pakistan Interior Ministry's top ten most wanted list.

The man who so nearly produced a terrorist spectacle to outdo even the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center may still be at large.