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Bombers visited Pakistan twice
21/07/2005 21:29 - (SA)
Karachi - Two of the four London bombers visited Pakistan together in 2003 before making another trip last year, said a Pakistani intelligence officer searching for local links to the attacks on Thursday.
The officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Shahzad Tanweer, 22 and Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, who visited Pakistan from November 19 2004 to February 8 this year, also came to the port city of Karachi in July 2003.
In a nationwide crackdown Pakistan had arrested more than 200 suspected militants, amid international pressure to clamp down on suspected breeding grounds of religious violence and terrorism.
The official said immigration records showed the two came in July 2003, but that searches of hotel records and interviews with leaders of madrassas, or Islamic schools, had so far failed to reveal any details of their stay.
Bomber visited Pakistan in July
He said: "The immigration record showed their visit to Karachi in 2003, but we have not yet been able to trace their motives behind these visits."
He said, as previously reported, a third British bomber of Pakistani descent, Hasbib Hussain, 18, visited Pakistan in July 2004 on a Saudi Airlines flight, but it remained unclear when or where he left the country.
Security agencies said they believed Tanweer and Khan had either stayed in an apartment in Karachi or in a madrassa in 2003, since more than two dozen hotels questioned said they did not have records of them.
An intelligence official said: "They did not even get their tickets reconfirmed from here, but we have asked the concerned airlines to provide their records."
Intelligence officials deny reports
The officer said security services had also checked the records of some of the leading madrassas in Karachi, and officials at the seminaries were shown photographs of Tanweer and Khan to find out if they had stayed there.
Pakistani intelligence officials had denied reports that the nationwide raids had so far led to any breakthrough arrests in the hunt for a mastermind of the London attacks that killed at least 56 people and wounded 700.
Police on Wednesday night raided two madrassas in the eastern district of Karachi and one in Hyderabad, 160km northeast of the port city. Police sources said they detained five Islamic preachers.
Karachi police chief Tariq Jamil said: "So far nothing has been found about the London bombers from any of the extremists arrested in the last four days."
- AFP
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