Posted on 08/10/2002 4:49:02 PM PDT by knighthawk
KARACHI (Reuters) - A Pakistani court has issued arrest warrants for six fugitives suspected of being involved in a car bomb attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi that killed 12 people and injured 20, defence lawyers have said.
Three leading suspects in the attack -- Mohammad Imran, Mohammad Hanif and Mohammad Ashraf -- have already been arrested and appeared in an anti-terrorism court amid tight security on Saturday.
The main suspects and an inspector of Pakistan's paramilitary Rangers, Waseem Akhtar, were charged with both the June 14 bombing and conspiracy to kill President Pervez Musharraf.
"The court today issued non-bailable warrants for the arrest of six other people who are absconders in the case," Raza Abidi, a defence lawyer for Imran, told reporters.
Abidi said the court had set August 16 as the date for the next preliminary hearing.
All the victims in the car bomb attack were Pakistanis.
The three main suspects are members of al-Almi, an offshoot of the radical Harkat-ul-Mujahideen organisation.
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen has long been on a blacklist of organisations deemed "terrorist" by the United States and reportedly has links to Muslim separatists fighting Indian rule in disputed Kashmir region.
Two of the accused -- Imran and Hanif, the head of the organisation and his deputy respectively -- admitted at a news conference last month both to their involvement in the consulate attack and the plot to assassinate Musharraf.
They said their targets included U.S. interests in Pakistan, such as fast food chains McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
"I AM INNOCENT"
But Imran told reporters before the start of Saturday's hearing that he was not involved.
"I am innocent and I have been falsely implicated in these cases...How can I kill my own sisters and brothers?" he said.
However, he said he was a jihadi (holy warrior) and that he had been to Kashmir and Afghanistan several times. "If I get the opportunity I will go there again."
Pakistan abandoned its support for the Taliban in Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks on the United States and threw its weight behind the U.S.-led war against al Qaeda operatives and Taliban.
This incensed Islamic militants who have have stepped up attacks on Christian and foreign targets in Pakistan, killing dozens of people.
Three nurses were killed in a grenade attack on Friday on a Christian hospital in Taxila town, close to Islamabad, in less than a week after gunmen killed six Pakistanis in a school for foreign missionaries in Murree, another town near the capital.
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