PAKISTAN: Pakistan has launched a series of arrests against Islamist militants across the country, in a move explicitly linked to the investigation of the July 7th bomb attacks in London, officials said.
Security officers yesterday detained at least 25 people in raids in several major cities including Faisalabad, Multan and Dera Ghazi Khan.
Two of the London bombers - Mohammad Sidique Khan (30) and Shehzad Tanweer (22) - are believed to have visited Lahore and Faisalabad after flying into Karachi airport together last November. They returned to Britain in February.
"The suspects are being questioned for links with any of the bombers," according to an official in Punjab's provincial government.
The wave of arrests came as new details emerged of the role played by Osama Nazir, a senior Pakistani militant linked to the bombers. Nazir, who is now in prison, claimed last week that he met Tanweer in Faisalabad, a large dusty textile city 120km southwest of Lahore, in 2003.
Sources yesterday said that Nazir, who is in his 40s, ran a safe house for militants from a small, discrete madrassa in the city, Jamia Fateh-ur-Rahmin. Militants frequently stayed at his guesthouse, checking in under assumed names.
"Nazir provided a safe house and collected money from rich people in the area," Shamsul Islam Naz, the Faisalabad correspondent with the respected Dawn newspaper, said. "You could describe him as a sort of patron.
"Militants stayed with him using code names. When they left he gave them money. He fixed the logistics. Eventually he got involved in plotting attacks himself."
The revelation suggests that during Tanweer's last Pakistan trip just months before the London bombings he was in contact with an underground network of Islamist radicals.
Nazir is alleged to have carried out a series of bomb attacks, as well as a failed assassination attempt against Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf. A veteran of the 1980s jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union , Nazir was a member of the banned Sunni group Jaish-e-Mohammad, and, later, its splinter faction the Lashkar-i-Jhangi.
In the southwestern city of Quetta, meanwhile, police rounded up nearly two dozen activists of militant groups. A police officer in Peshawar said he expected arrests in North-West Frontier province, the pro-Taliban tribal region next to Afghanistan, to begin soon. - (Guardian Service)
In Cairo, the Egyptian cabinet said an Egyptian biochemist being questioned had no links with the bombings. Last week authorities detained Magdy Elnashar, who has denied any role in the attacks. British police had been searching Elnashar's rented flat in Leeds which had been linked to the bombers.