The suicide bombing that killed an American diplomat in Karachi last March, just before a visit by President Bush, was organised by a small cell of Pakistani militants and masterminded by an operative of Al Qaeda based in the Pakistan’s tribal areas, New York Times quoted Pakistani officials as saying on Saturday. The charge is being made by Pakistani officials as they present evidence — the result of months of investigations by the police, assisted by FBI investigators — at the trial of two men accused in the plot, the newspaper says. The men, Anwarul Haq, 27, and Usman Ghani, 26, both ethnic Pashtuns from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, grew up in the teeming working-class neighbourhoods of Karachi and fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the investigators say. On Thursday, they sat behind bars, wearing long beards and knitted prayer caps, at the back of a courtroom in Karachi’s central jail, listening intently to an investigator outline the evidence against them.
Publicly, Pakistani leaders have sought to play down the importance of its tribal areas as havens for militants. But the evidence being presented by Pakistani investigators makes clear the threat contained in Waziristan, not only for Afghanistan but also for Pakistan itself, which has suffered six suicide bombings in the last five weeks, the newspaper says.
| Two assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003 were also traced to Qaeda and militants who enjoyed a haven in Waziristan, where the government has little control and foreign and Pakistani militants operate almost unimpeded, according to Sindh Home Secretary Ghulam Mohatarem, a retired army brigadier. |
Mohatarem said that the police in Karachi tracked down and disrupted the activities of numerous terrorist splinter groups in recent months. “We are slightly more confident because the logistics have become more difficult for them,” he said. Yet the threat of terrorism remains, he and others agreed. “We cannot say it has been wiped out,” a senior police official said of Al Qaeda.
Family members denied in interviews that the two defendants had gone to Afghanistan, knew the bomber, Raja Tahir, 23, also from Karachi, or had any jihad links. Both men are pleading not guilty, their lawyers said. But the police say there is little doubt that the suicide bombing of March 2, 2006, which killed the diplomat David Foy, his driver and three others, had a Qaeda connection because of the timing. The mastermind of the plot, Qari Mohammed Zafar, a man from Karachi with known links to Al Qaeda, remains at large in Waziristan, Mohatarem said.