'Suicide-bomber' sisters held

2005-06-09 20:56

Rana Jawad

Islamabad - Pakistani police have arrested two sisters from an Islamic militant group with links to al-Qaeda, who were allegedly plotting suicide attacks against minority Shiite Muslims, officials said on Thursday.

They would have been the first female suicide bombers to strike the key US ally and were the subject of an intensive year-long hunt by security forces in Pakistan, which has suffered a recent wave of suicide bombings.

The pair, identified by police as Arifa and Habiba and said to be aged between 18 and 20, were seized from a hideout in the scenic northern tourist town of Swat early this week, a senior security official told AFP.

Investigators said they were trained by their uncle, a top member of the Sunni Muslim Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group, who was sentenced to death last week for killing 45 people in two suicide attacks on Shiite mosques in Karachi in 2004.

"Security agencies had been desperately looking for the two sisters and located them hiding in a house in Swat following a tip-off," a security official told AFP.

"It would have been the first attack of its kind and a very difficult one to prevent," added a senior police official involved in the interrogation of the uncle.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has alleged links to the al-Qaeda terror network, is regarded as the fiercest of Pakistan's Sunni extremist outfits and has been blamed for the murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl in early 2002.

Police first revealed the existence of the two women in July 2004, when security forces were placed on high alert and told to look out for the pair.

The women's uncle, Gul Hasan, had admitted training his nieces for a suicide attack on a gathering of Shiite men and women, the police investigator told AFP.

Swat, where the women were arrested, is about 50km from the industrial city of Mardan, where alleged senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Faraj al-Libbi was arrested in early May.

He was deported to the United States last week.

- SAPA