Abu Zubaida---Osama second in command in Pakistani custody??...the report on yesterdays raid with FBI help.
One of the arrested suspects, who was also injured in the operation, is Abu Zubaida who is second-in-command of the al-Qaeda network after Osama bin Laden. Authorities, though admitted the man had close resemblance with Abu Zubaida, declined to confirm the report, saying the identity would be established after interrogating the man. However, sources insisted he was Zubaida.
The postmortems of corpses had been conducted by a panel of five doctors at a Faisalabad hospital at about 12:30am. Well-placed sources in a Pakistani intelligence agency said the dead men were foreigners and were well-built with a fair complexion. The condition of the other injured was reported to be stable. One of the dead, Dawood, was reported to be a Syrian, sources claimed.
Details of the autopsy report were being kept secret and the doctors at the Allied Hospital were closely monitored so that no one could acquire some information. While the authorities were keeping mum over the whole issue, it was learnt Punjab Governor Khalid Maqbool took a serious notice of the performance of local intelligence network which failed to inform him about such a big crackdown.
A well-placed official in a Pakistani intelligence agency said on condition anonymity that the Punjab governor was angry over the poor performance of the local agencies concerned regarding information about such hide-outs and places of suspected terrorists.
"All the intelligence agencies concerned have been directed to submit detailed reports as to how the FBI people could succeed in unearthing the places of suspected al-Qaeda men," the well-placed official of an intelligence agency admitted.
He confirmed that the joint crackdown of Pak-US authorities involving killings of two suspected al-Qaeda men was actually planned and led by the US agents and commandos. "The whole intelligence network was only assigned with the job of collecting information and producing them for the Americans for developing a strategy as per their requirement," the intelligence agency official said.
The governor had also expressed his doubts over the working of local intelligence agencies, as they could not provide any information about such residences of foreigners in Faisalabad, the source said.
The source said more raids had been stopped owing to the possibility that al-Qaeda men might have gone underground. However, such crackdowns in the near future could not be ruled out, he added.
It was also learnt that the Operations AIG had faxed a portion of the detailed report into the joint Pak-US operation at Faisalabad to the Punjab police Inspector General when the latter stopped him from doing the same through a telephone call.
"It is a usual activity that the Operations AIG faxes a copy of detailed reports to the Punjab governor, IGP and the DIGs concerned," a source in the police department said. The News tried to contact the IGP, Lahore DIG, Faisalabad DIG, CID DIG and some other authorities concerned for comments, but they could not respond.
AP adds: Dozens of Islamic militants, including Arabs and Afghans, arrested in a series of raids have admitted links to al-Qaeda, police investigators say. Police raided Islamic extremist hideouts throughout eastern Pakistan on Thursday, arresting 40 suspected al-Qaeda members and seizing computers in what the authorities described as a crackdown on a significant al-Qaeda cell.
Those familiar with interrogations said over a dozen Arabs and four Taliban sympathisers were among the nabbed and that many of the men admitted their links to al-Qaeda and two banned extremist groups.
A senior Interior Ministry official speaking on condition of anonymity said the government would share information from the questioning with the United States and that some of the suspects could also be handed over to the US government.
The raids came as police investigated links between Islamic militants and the March 17 grenade attack on a Protestant church that killed five people, including US Embassy employee Barbara Green and her 17-year-old daughter Kristen Wormsley. The News reporting today.. |
