ISLAMABAD, 26 July 2005 — Nine Pakistanis reportedly being sought by Egyptian authorities are unlikely to have been involved in bomb attacks that killed scores of people at a Red Sea resort, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday.
Muhammad Naeem Khan said a media report had created an impression the Pakistanis were prime suspects in the attack on Sharm El-Sheikh on Saturday, but the Egyptian authorities had not passed on any such information to Pakistan’s Embassy in Cairo. “I think that there is no connection between these nine Pakistanis and the bomb blasts in Egypt,” Khan told a regular weekly news conference.
“We have no information about those nine Pakistanis. Basically, these reports have come from media sources,” he said.
“As far as the government of Egypt is concerned, it has not got in touch with us,” Khan added. Pakistani officials had earlier bridled at media speculation linking their country to the July 7 bomb attacks on London that killed at least 56 people.
Three of the four London bombers were Britons of Pakistani descent and the fourth was a Briton of Jamaican origin.
President Pervez Musharraf has said there is no evidence so far to link the attacks in London to Pakistan, though there were ongoing investigations into visits by at least two of the July 7 bombers to Pakistan.
Yesterday, Musharraf said that the outside world was under a misconception that Al-Qaeda still operates from Pakistan, whereas security forces had destroyed its capability to communicate quickly and run operations from his country.
“I am saying very clearly that Al-Qaeda does not exist in Pakistan anymore,” Musharraf told journalists in the eastern city of Lahore.
Pakistan has arrested more than 700 Al-Qaeda suspects since joining a global war on terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Musharraf said last week he suspected Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was hiding somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Musharraf said in Lahore that while some Al-Qaeda operatives were still hiding in Pakistan’s rugged mountains, they had been reduced to communicating through human couriers.
“Is it possible for Al-Qaeda to carry out terrorism in London and other far-flung places of the world like Egypt with such a poor communication system?” Musharraf said.
Last week, Pakistan launched a major crackdown against preachers of religious hatred and Islamist militants, and Musharraf vowed that all the people held would be charged under an anti-terrorism law. More than 300 people have been detained.
