KARACHI, 15 September 2005 — Pakistani police arrested a key suspect in the slaying last year of a prominent Sunni in the port city, sources said.
Mufti Mizamuddin Shamzai, who had called for a “jihad” against the United States after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was shot dead in May 2004.
Nafees Khan, 30, a Shiite, was nabbed in a police raid on a house in an eastern neighborhood of Karachi, said police investigator Farooq Awan.
The raid came after a witness had earlier identified Nafees from a picture in a police database of militant suspects as one of the six gunmen who shot the noted cleric last year, Awan said.
Awan described Nafees as a “key suspect for us” but would not say whether Nafees was linked with any militant group.
Shamzai was a strong supporter of Afghanistan’s former Taleban regime.
Unidentified gunmen shot dead a Shiite Muslim in Quetta yesterday , police said.
Two attackers sprayed bullets at Ijaz Jaffry as he went to the government office where he worked as a clerk in Quetta, the capital of restive Balochistan province.
An angry crowd then took the body to the provincial governor’s residence but police using tear gas shells dispersed them, witnesses said.
In another incident, a bomb strapped to a man’s body exploded inside an Islamic school in Balochistan yesterday, killing him and injuring four other people, an official said.
The explosion occurred in the seminary in Samzai, a village about 70 km northwest of Quetta, capital of southwestern Balochistan province, local government administrator Asmatullah Kakar said. Kakar said it was not clear whether it was a suicide attack targeting the Sunni Muslim school.
“We do not know yet whether they wanted to carry out explosions in the madrassa or an act of terrorism elsewhere,” he said.
The man who died came to the school with two other men, all posing as guests in the village, and they were speaking with the school’s administrator when the bomb went off, Kakar said, quoting the administrator, Maulvi Jamaluddin.
The two other visitors and two students at the school were injured.
The two injured men have been arrested and police seized five homemade bombs from them, Kakar said.
The men’s names were not given; Kakar said one is an Afghan.
Meanwhile, counterterrorism experts are questioning 21 suspects captured at an Al-Qaeda hide-out for clues about remnants of the terror network and the Taleban, an intelligence official said yesterday.
The suspects — who intelligence official said include Afghans — were captured this week during the biggest-ever military operation in North Waziristan.
Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, the top army commander responsible for anti-terrorism operations, said Tuesday that troops had destroyed a major Al-Qaeda hide-out and caught “some important men.”
He would not identify them.
The hide-out appeared sophisticated, Hussain said, with communications equipment to contact militants in Afghanistan, a cache of bombs, detonators and rockets, and a tiny Chinese-made drone aircraft used for surveillance.
