British authorities have given Pakistan a list of telephones calls made from the house of one of bombers in the attacks on London, but checks have drawn blanks so far, Pakistani intelligence officials said yesterday.
Three of the four bombers were young British Muslims of Pakistani descent and have been identified as Shehzad Tanweer, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Hasib Hussain. The fourth was a Jamaican-born Briton.
An intelligence official said checks based on the telephone numbers dialled from Tanweer's home in Britain had yielded no results so far.
"We have quizzed three people whose numbers were found in the list, but we have concluded that they have nothing to do with Tanweer," he said, on condition of anonymity. He said these people were family friends, including two businessmen.
Investigators had earlier confirmed that Tanweer (22) had visited the cities of Faisalabad and Lahore during two trips to Pakistan over the past two years and that the authorities were now sure Khan and Hussain had also visited Pakistan in 2004.
Another intelligence official said five more people had been detained near Faisalabad on Saturday night, raising the number held in the central province of Punjab to more than a dozen. Two suspects picked up in the city of Gujranwala were believed to belong to the banned al Qaeda-linked Kashmiri militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of Mohammad), a source said.
On Saturday, security agents 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 Jaish-e-Mohammad, an unpredictable group that has splintered into small cells, but a school official denied any link with Tanweer.