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| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| Karachi mosque bomber was a police constable: Pak police |
| 2004-05-15 |
| Pakistan police investigating last week’s suicide bomb attack in a Shia mosque in Karachi suspect that the suicide bomber who blew himself up was a local policeman with links to banned extremist Sunni militant group. Reports from Karachi quoting police officials said that the man, Mohammad Albar, who had blown himself up in the Hyderi Mosque in Karachi during the Friday prayers on May 7 was an activist of Sipha-e-Sabaha, the Sunni extremist group banned by President Pervez Musharraf. Akbar joined the police to be an informer to his groups previously took part in ’jihad’ in Afghanistan and later joined police as a constable, they said. "We have almost identified this man as the suicide bomber and statements of witnesses also substantiated his presence in the mosque," local daily Dawn quoted a police investigator as saying. Significantly, Akbar went into the mosque to pray wearing the police uniform and was identified by the buckle of the police belt which bore the number "8242". Barring the buckle, the rest of the body was disintegrated under the impact of explosives strapped to his body. "We have obtained samples of Akbar’s belongings from his home and these samples along with specimen of the limbs of an unidentified person, were sent for DNA tests. We believe the limbs were of Akbar but things would be clear only after the DNA tests," a police official said. Akbar’s identity came even as suspected extremists killed five members of a shia family, including an infant and their maid in their house-cum-school at Lahore. Police said six persons including two children and two women were brutally shot dead. The killers also wrote anti-shia graffiti on the walls of the house. |
| Posted by:TS(vice girl) |