 The police have freed a key suspect in a suicide bombing that killed around 150 people at last yearÂ’s homecoming rally for former premier Benazir Bhutto, an official said on Monday.
Prisons Inspector General (IG) Yameen Khan told AFP Qari Saifullah Akhtar was released on June 8. “We released him on Friday after the expiry of his detention period,” the IG said.
Akhtar’s lawyer Hashmat Habib said he was freed because of a lack of evidence. “He is a free person. There is no case against him anywhere in Pakistan,” Habib said, adding that the authorities had “facilitated” his return to Lahore.
| The witnesses, all 150 of them, are dead ... |
Benazir accused Qari Saifullah Akhtar in her book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West, of plotting against her. Akhtar was arrested in February 2008 in Lahore soon after the book was published.
A court in Karachi released him on bail after police said they had no evidence against him, but he was re-arrested in late March under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance. He met Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden several times in Afghanistan, security officials said.
The attorney admitted that Akhtar used to command a guerrilla group that fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but said his client had renounced militancy, denying that Akhtar had anything to do with the Karachi attack, AP reported.
Akhtar was arrested in the United Arab Emirates in August 2004 and later extradited to Pakistan, where he was released under unclear circumstances.
| Perfectly clear to the astute observer ... |
|