ISLAMABAD, 8 February 2007 — Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Tariq Azeem said here yesterday that important government buildings including the parliament house and the federal secretariat are the targets of terrorists.
Speaking at a press conference here, Azeem said the government had received intelligence reports about a series of attacks being planned by terror outfits. The attack on the Islamabad International Airport was one of them. He said police found Russian-made hand-grenades after the blast at the airport.
Referring to the measures taken after the intelligence report, Azeem said, “All cars leading to the parliament building, Supreme Court and the secretariat would be thoroughly checked with metal detectors. Only the cars of the president and the prime minister will be exempted.”
The government barred the entry of all private TV channels in the parliament and other important buildings yesterday prompting a walkout by the media representatives.
Meanwhile, investigators quizzed two suspects involved in the Islamabad airport attack.
The two suspects and the attacker were in a car that drove to the airport car parking area, where he exchanged gunfire with security forces, injuring three policemen, after they stopped him at a checkpoint. He then died in the grenade blast.
“Two people arrested at the scene are being interrogated by a joint investigation team,” said Saud Aziz, the police chief of Rawalpindi, a city adjoining Islamabad.
“One of them says that he was just a driver and was hired from Golra More (an Islamabad suburb) to go to the airport,” he said. Investigators were trying to match the bomber’s face with police records and had fingerprinted him, he said.
The bomber’s corpse, with the legs mangled by the blast, was shown to journalists after the attack.
Officials hoped the suspects could provide leads to the group behind the attack amid fears the militants were increasingly “desperate” to send a message to Musharraf’s government. Pro-Taleban fighters in January vowed to avenge an airstrike on an alleged Al-Qaeda camp in the South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan, which broke a nearly two-year truce between the government and militants.
“Links are pointing there, but we are still investigating,” Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said when asked if investigations into the previous attacks had provided leads to militants in the tribal region.
Musharraf condemned the “terrorist” attack and praised the security forces for foiling it, state media said.
The incident was no longer being considered a suicide attack because “when we searched the body we did not find any explosive belt on him,” Sherpao said.
Instead, the militant armed with pistols and grenades likely planned a “hit and run attack” on crowds at the arrivals area, which failed when he panicked, said Brig. Javed Cheema, head of the Interior Ministry’s National Crisis Management Cell.
“When police tried to check the car, he pulled a mask on his face and started firing. He ran toward the car park and threw a grenade, which did not explode. Three bullets hit him in the chest and one grenade was found on his body,” Cheema said.
