LAHORE, 21 December 2004 — Police have thwarted a “major terrorist attack” in the eastern city of Lahore after arresting six suspected militants, including an aide to a wanted Libyan Al-Qaeda operative, they said yesterday.
The Libyan terror suspect is the mastermind behind two assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf.
Malik Tehsin, 31, was among the six men nabbed in Lahore, said Shafqaat Ahmed, a senior superintendent of police.
Ahmed told a news conference that Tehsin had arranged accommodations, transportation for Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, who is among the most wanted men in Pakistan.
Explosives, hand-grenades and ammunition were recovered during the weekend raids.
“The group was planning a major terrorist attack in Lahore,” Ahmed said.
Tehsin belonged to two banned Sunni militant outfits, Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and Laskar-e-Jhangvi, and received training in Afghanistan several years ago, Ahmed said.
Tehsin, who met Al-Libbi in Afghanistan, also helped him arrange logistics for terrorist attacks in Pakistan, he said.
Pakistan has posted a reward of 20 million rupees ($333,333) for the arrest of Al-Libbi for masterminding two attacks on Musharraf’s motorcade on Dec. 14 and 25 last year. The United States has also offered a $5 million reward on his arrest.
Pakistani authorities in September shot dead local Al-Qaeda lynchpin Amjad Farooqi, a co-planner in the Christmas Day attempt on Musharraf’s life and the beheading of US reporter Daniel Pearl.
Other major successes against Al-Qaeda this year include Tanzanian national Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was convicted for the 1998 twin bombings of US embassies in East Africa, and Pakistani Al-Qaeda computer expert Naeem Noor Khan.
Meanwhile, authorities have released the chief of an outlawed militant group, after he was interrogated for about eight months for his alleged links with Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and Afghanistan’s Taleban regime, a news report said yesterday.
The Urdu-language daily Ausaf quoted sources in the banned Harkatul Mujahedeen group as saying that Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil had been held and questioned and then released. “Security agencies interrogated Khalil thoroughly but failed to prove that he sent militants to Afghanistan,” Ausaf said.
Khalil, who was active in the Afghan war against the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s, also ran a militant training camp in Afghanistan’s Khost province that was struck in August 1998 by US missiles in retaliation for attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in May 1998.
US and Pakistani intelligence officials believe Khalil was trained together with Osama Bin Laden in a camp run by Palestinian dissident Dr. Abdullah Assam in Afghanistan.
Harkatul Mujahedeen had long been considered an extension of Bin Laden’s terrorist network and its members used to arrange interviews for journalists. Its members had also actively participated in the separatist insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Khalil went underground after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf banned Harkat with other five militant organizations in January 2002 — all of which were designated by Washington as terrorist groups.
