Pakistan mounts terror swoop against al-Qaida
Pakistani agents have called in the FBI to help determine if an al-Qaida leader is among seven suspected terror suspects arrested in a weekend raid.
Officials said the suspects were two Egyptian and three Afghan men, and two Arab women. They would not identify them further, and there was no word on whether they were believed to be engaged in an active plot.
They were arrested in a raid on a flats complex in Karachi yesterday, a day after President Pervez Musharraf renewed Pakistan’s vow to fight terrorism. Five grenades, four handguns, ammunition and maps of Pakistan and Afghanistan were seized.
“Photographs of the arrested people have been taken and they are being matched with other pictures of al Qaida suspects,” an intelligence official told The Associated Press today. “We are trying to establish whether any senior al Qaida leader is among these people.”
Agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation were set to join Pakistani intelligence officers today or tomorrow in interrogating the suspects, the official said.
US Embassy officials were not immediately available for comment.
The Pakistanis had hoped to arrest a leader of a local Islamic militant organisation in yesterday’s raid, but he was not there, the official said.
In the raid, 50 to 60 armed officers surrounded the Cassim Complex apartment block in the middle-class Gulistan-e-Jauhar neighbourhood, where the suspects had lived for two months.
Residents said police broke down the door of a fourth-floor flat and brought out the suspects, blindfolded and handcuffed, about half an hour later.
Police also took away three children: an infant carried by one of the women, and two boys ages four and five. No gunfire was reported.
Later on Sunday, information from a suspect – arrested during the investigation of Friday’s car bombing that injured 15 people outside a Christian Bible society – led police to a bomb factory and cache of explosives in an abandoned house.
Police drew no connection between the suspected al Qaida arrests and the car bombing, believed to have been carried out by homegrown militants. But the incidents underscore the scope of fighting extremist violence in the teeming port city of 14 million people.
Yesterday’s arrests coincide with stepped-up military operations to hunt al Qaida fugitives in Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas along the rugged Afghan border – a possible hiding place for Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri.
Tribal elders have turned in more than 40 men to Pakistani authorities in the past week, but it is not known whether any are al Qaida members. They are believed to be tribesmen who may have helped shelter fugitives and fighters from Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime.
Al Qaida and Taliban fighters are believed to use the tribal lands to attack US troops in Afghanistan and then slip back across the border to relative safety. The Pakistan government exercises little control over such areas.
Pakistan withdrew its backing of the Taliban after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and has arrested more than 500 al Qaida suspects in the past two years – including alleged Sept. 11 organisers. Many of the suspects have been handed over to US authorities.
