A senior al-Qaeda operative who hid from Interpol in the city of Niigata for more than a year made phone calls to two Japanese and 11 foreign Muslim men in Japan after he left the country last year, investigative sources said.

The latest investigations into Lionel Dumont, a 33-year-old French national of Algerian descent, revealed that the two Japanese -- a man in Yokohama's Hodogaya Ward and a woman in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture -- were among the 13 people Dumont called.

This is the first time details about the identities of the 13 have been made public.