An Intelligence Bureau official was arrested with explosives near the Chief Minister’s Secretariat on Tuesday, with Chief Minister Akram Durrani appearing to suggest that he was the target of a bomb plot cooked up by the IB.Durrani told a press conference that Muhammad Tufail, the IB employee, was arrested by policemen at around 11am outside his Peshawar office while “trying to plant a bomb” in a dustbin.
“We are considering whether the IB is directly responsible for it or if it is the outcome of the grudges the federal government has against the NWFP,” he said, and recalled that his house in Bannu had been attacked in the past.
He said after Tufail was arrested he was taken to Eastern police station along with the bomb. “When the case was registered and Tufail was apprehended, Zafarullah, the IB joint director in Peshawar, rushed to the police station and took away Tufail and the bomb with him,” he said.
The chief minister then ordered the police to raid the IB office, but Tufail and Zafrullah were not there. He said he would not spare the IB officials involved in this case.
Durrani demanded that Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz order an inquiry into this case and hand over the IB officials involved in the “plan” to the NWFP government. The IB is directly answerable to the prime minister. “The IB is a federal institution but it now becomes our enemy,” he said.
He said he had discussed the incident with Governor Jan Ali Orakzai and the NWFP government was trying to resolve the case, “but the federal government is creating problems”.
He announced Rs 50,000 prize money for the policemen who arrested Tufail.
He said he and other NWFP MPAs would protest outside Prime MinisterÂ’s House if the federal government did not give the province its share of hydro-electricity profits.