ISLAMABAD, 29 May 2004 — A suspect wanted in the murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl was behind two attempts to kill President Pervez Musharraf in December, intelligence officials said yesterday.
Musharraf, a key ally in the US-led war on terror, was unharmed in the attempts on Dec. 14 and Dec. 25, but 15 people died in the latter, including the two suicide bombers.
Intelligence officials said investigators had linked the attacks to Al-Qaeda operative Amjad Hussain Farooqi, a key suspect in the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Farooqi, still at large, is also the alleged mastermind of a bloody suicide bombing of the US Consulate in Karachi in 2002.
Yesterday, the Pakistani newspaper The News quoted security officials as saying Farooqi had had direct contacts with Al-Qaeda’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks arrested in a Pakistani Army major’s house in the city of Rawalpindi near Islamabad last year.
It said he trained two dozen air force technicians from Rawalpindi’s Chaklala air force base for the first attack on Musharraf and recruited the bombers who carried out the second.
The News quoted its sources as saying that the technicians spent two days strapping C4 plastic explosive to pillars of a road bridge in the city of Rawalpindi before the Dec. 14 attack, unnoticed by police or military intelligence officials supposed to watch the route of Musharraf’s motorcade.
