Pakistan has busted an Al-Qaeda-linked plot to kill civil and military officials and attack key sites including the US embassy and the military headquarters, officials said yesterday.
The government said intelligence agencies had arrested around a dozen local and foreign militants who plotted attacks that were to begin August 13.
"Their plan was to carry out physical assaults on important civil and military dignitaries using sophisticated weapons and hand grenades," Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said early yesterday.
Hayat said their targets included the legislature, military headquarters, the prime minister's house, the presidency, the US embassy and the residence of President Pervez Musharraf.
He said the arrests were made between August 11 and 15 and the plot had been masterminded by Egyptian Al-Qaeda suspect Sheikh Esa, alias Qari Ismail. Security officials did not confirm whether the Egyptian was arrested.
The arrests marked the latest success in a crackdown launched by Pakistani security agencies in July. More than 60 suspects, among them some key Al-Qaeda operatives, have been arrested.
"It is a big achievement of Pakistani intelligence agencies, which carried out daring raids at serious personal risks to foil the sinister plan," said Brigadier Javed Cheema.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid told reporters on Saturday that the conspiracy could have killed hundreds of people.
"These people were planning to carry out destructive and bloody terrorist attacks during a week-long time starting from August 13," he said.
Rashid said a huge cache of arms and ammunition recovered from the suspects included bombs, grenades, rockets, rocket launchers, detonators and around 50 explosive devices.
"We are looking for three or four more suspects in connection with the plot," he said.
The interior minister said the leader of Islamabad's Lal Mosque, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, was the main coordinator in the planning. It was not clear whether Ghazi was among those arrested.
Ghazi was already wanted in connection with a religious edict he and some clerics had issued a few months ago against military operations in the tribal region near the Afghan border against Al-Qaeda linked fugitives.
"Ghazi was the main communicator between the Egyptian Al-Qaeda operative and other men involved in the plot," he said.
In mid-July, Pakistani intelligence arrested Al-Qaeda's Pakistani computer expert, Naeem Noor Khan, in Lahore. Two weeks later Tanzanian Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, indicted in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa, was also captured.
Information gleaned from the key operatives led to disclosure of plots to launch attacks in Pakistan, the US and Britain.
Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz, who is to be sworn in as prime minister next week, survived an Al-Qaeda-linked assassination attempt on July 30. Nine people were killed in the suicide attack.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
The US government has banned US government personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, The Associated Press (AP) has learned. Four people with direct knowledge of the matter told the AP about the policy, which was put into effect by departing US ambassador Nicholas Burns in January shortly before he left China. The people would speak only on condition of anonymity to discuss details of a confidential directive. Although some US agencies already had strict rules on such relationships, a blanket “nonfraternization” policy, as it is known, has
RSS