Spanish judge indicts 13 AQ members
Florida police checking on why small explosive left behind
Professor finds security flaws
Triple bombing in Burma leads to accusations of CIA training of terrorists
LAHORE, Pakistan - Intelligence agents arrested two members of an outlawed Pakistani militant group in a raid on a hotel in the eastern city of Lahore on Wednesday and one of the men is believed to be a fund-raiser for Al Qaeda, an intelligence official said.
The Pakistanis - members of the Sunni Muslim militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi - were arrested before dawn at the Munawar hotel near Lahore’s main railway station, the official said on condition of anonymity.
He named one suspect as Mohammed Khaliq, 42, and the other as Maulvi Mohammed Sadiq, who is also wanted by police for a suspected role in the killing of an Iranian diplomat in Lahore in 1992.
Police would not confirm the arrests.
The official said agents also seized 900,000 rupees (US$15,000) from the hotel room where the two men were captured, he said.
Sadiq told interrogators in initial questioning that he had sheltered and provided logistic facilities for Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan and had collected money for the terror network in different cities in Pakistan in the past six months, the official said.
The official said Sadiq did not say whether he had links with Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the reputed Al Qaeda No. 3, who was arrested in the northwestern city of Mardan earlier this month.
Sadiq’s capture followed information from another member of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi who had been arrested a few months ago in Multan, another city in the eastern Punjab province of which Lahore is the capital, the official said.
In 2001, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi for its suspected involvement in the killings of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan. The group is also believed to have forged ties with Al Qaeda.