Posted on 07/16/2005 9:31:56 AM PDT by ex-Texan
FAISALABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani security forces have detained two men in the city of Lahore on suspicion of links with one of the suicide bombers in last week's attacks in London, an intelligence official said on Saturday.
The news of detention came hours after the security officials investigating connections with the bombings said they had rounded up four suspects in the central city of Faisalabad.
Intelligence officials had earlier revealed that Shehzad Tanweer, one of the three British-born bombers of Pakistani origin, had visited Faisalabad and the eastern city of Lahore on two trips to Pakistan over the past two years.
"We are interrogating whether these two people (detained in Lahore) had any links with Tanweer," an intelligence official told Reuters.
The security agencies are probing Tanweer's links with militant groups and madrassahs, or Islamic schools, in Pakistan.
On Saturday, agents of two security agencies questioned teachers, students and other staff of Manzoor-ul-Islam, a madrassah in Lahore which Tanweer was thought to have visited in 2004. The madrassah is connected to al Qaeda-linked Kashmiri militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of Mohammad).
An intelligence official said security agents had questioned people in the madrassah for several hours.
NO FOREIGN STUDENTS AFTER 9/11
Asadullah Farooq, administrator of the madrassah, later denied any link with Tanweer.
"Neither any person with this name (Tanweer) visited us nor do we know him," he told a news conference. "We have stopped entertaining foreign students after 9/11," he said referring to al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Pakistani intelligence officials say Tanweer met Osama Nazir, a member of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, in Faisalabad in 2003.
Nazir was arrested last December for the 2002 bombing of a church in Islamabad that killed two Americans among others.
Four men were rounded up from Osman Town neighborhood in Faisalabad this week, relatives and locals said. Nazir had also been arrested in Osman Town.
Farhat Bibi, the wife of one of the detained man, Shehzad Ahmed, told Reuters she had not heard from her husband since the night of July 12 when he was taken away at gunpoint by some 20 men in black uniforms and a handful in plain clothes.
"They asked my husband his name and where he came from and then took him away," the mother of two children said.
Another man, Nazir Ahmed, was rounded up from an adjoining lane in the same way, relatives said.
"Nazir Ahmed was a religious man. He used to offer his prayers five times a day regularly, but he was not affiliated with any Islamist group," Ahmed's aging father, Omar Din, told Reuters in his dark, dank house.
The intelligence officials say Tanweer, 22, made a second visit to Pakistan in late 2004 and stayed in Lahore from December until last February, during which time he visited several mosques and madrassahs.
One madrassah which some intelligence officials believed Tanweer visited was in Muridke, on the outskirts of Lahore and home of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a hardline Islamic charity organization made up of cadres of the Lashkar-e-Taiba Kashmiri militant group.
A spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa denied any links with Tanweer and said the group did not condone attacks on civilians
Lest we forget, Pakistan works with British military and Intel on a regular basis on WOT. Mussharif has such big tasks to round up and imprison perhaps a few hundred thousand goons who operate in his country. This stuff will go on for many years.
And any sane person with a bit of insight obviously realizes there is no option. GWB put it clear many times to the un-educated on the Islamic sponsored terrorist movements, that this would take many years to hopefully erase or at least lessen to a large degree, if world wide cooperation continues to increase, with common goals to eradicate all the radicalized Islamic groups. So easy to say, so difficult in reality to accomplish, for so many good and rational reasons.
What you forget is that had Musharraf closed down those camps in the 4 years since 9/11, 7/7 would not have happened. Everyone knew that the Muridke and Lahore camps were openly training terorrists to send to Kashmir. This is a classic arsonist turned fireman thing. More terror attacks in the West = More Bribes for Musharraf to "cooperate" in the investigation. By the time this winds up, we'll have another attack and the cycle continues. Meanwhile there's an endless supply of "Al Qaeda #3s" available in Pakistan. We had Al Libby, next Al Inodenisie or Al Kuwaiti. A nice scam if you can pull it off.
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