|
London bombers 'visited Pakistan'
16/07/2005 16:40 - (SA)
Islamabad - Three of the four London suicide bombers recently visited Pakistan and investigators are probing whether they met with al-Qaeda-linked militant groups, top security officials said on Saturday.
Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, and Shehzad Tanweer, 22, arrived together at Karachi Airport in November 2004 and returned to Britain in early February, two officials said on condition of anonymity.
Hasib Hussain, 18, the youngest of the three ethnic Pakistani Britons, came separately at an undisclosed time last year, also to Karachi, and went back to Britain shortly afterwards, the officials added.
The confirmation that the men had visited Pakistan throws the terror spotlight back on the South Asian country, where authorities have arrested a string of top al-Qaeda operatives since 2001.
Fifty-five people have been confirmed dead, and some 700 injured, in the London attacks.
The security officials said they had not been able to trace the movements of the three bombers - from Leeds and nearby Dewsbury in northern England - while they were in Pakistan.
"We are looking for their movements in Pakistan but so far we have not got anything concrete," one of the Karachi-based security officials said.
A hotbed of militants
"We don't know which organisation or which group they had been meeting here. But we are on it and we expect that the British government will give us some information on this."
Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and its commercial hub, is a hotbed of violent ethnic and sectarian militants. Its crowded tenement blocks have also been used by al-Qaeda fugitives previously driven out of Afghanistan.
The Pakistani security officials said that Khan and Shehzad "may have met some militants from a network that we are not aware of yet".
Asked if they may have had contacts with a group led by alleged al-Qaeda number three Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who was seized in northwestern Pakistan in May, one of the officials, said: "It is possible but we have no confirmation."
The two officials said they had no confirmation that either Khan or Shehzad had visited any Islamic schools while in Pakistan.
Shehzad's uncle has been quoted as saying his nephew studied at one of the schools. Two key seminaries with alleged former links to extremist groups have both denied he attended there.
"We have thoroughly checked records at the seminaries named in the media as suspected places where Shehzad was reported to have studied but found nothing," a senior intelligence official said.
He said information received from other districts in Pakistan's central province of Punjab also suggested that none of the named bombers had been to a seminary there.
"According to the efforts we have made so far we know that both Khan and Shehzad did not go to any known seminary here. But we are still checking," one of the Karachi-based officials said.
Khan's family said on Saturday their son must have been "brainwashed".
- AFP
|
News
