KARACHI/ISLAMABAD, 17 February 2007 — Pakistani police arrested three Al-Qaeda-linked would-be suicide bombers following a shootout in Karachi yesterday, a senior police official said.
“We have recovered a jacket used in suicide bomb attacks, hand grenades and pistols from them,” Fayyaz Khan, a senior official in the Crime Investigation Department (CID), told Reuters. He said the jacket was fitted with explosives.
“Now we are carrying out raids to arrest 10 more members of this group,” he said.
Khan said the three militants had been trained in Wana in South Waziristan, a restive tribal region on the border with Afghanistan and a hotbed of support for the Taleban.
“They have admitted getting training in Wana, and we have also recovered a list of potential targets from them,” Khan said, adding that the trainers were fellow Pakistanis, Uzbeks and East Africans.
Police also recovered a videodisc in which an Arabic-speaking man explains how to prepare a suicide bomber and how to inflict the maximum number of casualties.
A Reuters correspondent was shown the video. Only the trainer’s hands were visible, and mannequins were used to demonstrate the attack.
Khan said the captured men belonged to a faction known as the Qari Zafar group, which had links with Al-Qaeda and the Taleban and had been involved in previous suicide attacks in Pakistan.
“They had plans to carry out attacks in Karachi and Jhelum (in Punjab province),” Khan said.
He described the Qari Zafar group as a splinter group of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a militant organization that has targeted Pakistan’s Shiite minority, and has forged strong ties with Al-Qaeda.
The three — identified as Mohammad Shahid, Farhan Ahmed and Abdul Ghani, all in their 20s — are associates of suspects in a suicide attack near the US Consulate in Karachi in March 2006 that killed a US diplomat and three Pakistanis, Khan said.
“Abdul Ghani belongs to the Wana and he was apparently the one trained to carry out a suicide attack in Karachi,” he said.
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key ally of the United States in its war on terror, has banned a string of extremist groups amid evidence that sectarian extremists are forging closer links with Al-Qaeda and pro-Taleban fighters based in Pakistan’s remote border regions.
Khan said the three Karachi suspects had plotted to attack a foreign delegation at an arms fair in the city last summer and during the recent Ashura events. Neither plot came to fruition, he said.
In Rawalpindi, at least one construction laborer was killed and three injured when they accidentally hit abandoned ordnance while digging near the Ojhari camp locality where arms and ammunition were stored during the Afghan war. In May 1988 the ordnance depot caught fire resulting in many deaths. District Coordination Officer of Rawalpindi Iftkhar Shalwani told Arab News it was not an act of terrorism.
The explosion created panic among residents and police and rescue workers rushed to the site of the blast.
Authorities in the capital Islamabad on Thursday reported the capture of two leaders of an Al-Qaeda-linked sectarian group. The two men captured near Islamabad were senior figures in Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
The suspects, identified as Rashid Mahmood Satti and Chota Usman, were arrested in a raid on the outskirts of Islamabad earlier this week, an intelligence official said.
A police official said officers seized guns, hand grenades and other munitions from a house where the men had been living.
Satti and Usman had masterminded several attacks on Shiite mosques in recent years and were also involved in the killing of two senior police officers, the police official said. He requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.
