By Richard Engel
NBC News correspondent
Updated: 8:05 a.m. ET April 26, 2005BAGHDAD, Iraq - American special forces were tracking Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al-Qaida in Iraq, near the town of Ramadi two months ago, but the Jordanian-born terrorist leader escaped by jumping out of a moving vehicle, a senior U.S. military source tells NBC News.

Al-Zarqawi did, however, leave behind several key pieces of intelligence, the source said, the most important of which was his laptop computer.

Photos of suspected insurgents released by the military last month were taken from the "My Pictures" folder of that laptop, the source said. It was also full of telephone numbers.

Also left behind in the car was a bag with about $100,000 in euro currency. Another bag contained mini, plugin harddrives, the source said, and evidently al-Zarqawi was using these to distribute information to his network in Iraq.