Six suspected militants detained here last week have revealed they had plans to mount more bloody attacks on US and British-run Christian institutions in Pakistan, police investigators said on Sunday.
They alleged the mastermind was an Afghan trained Pakistani, Saifur Rehman Saifi, who was arrested following the August 9 grenade attack on a chapel in the Christian Missionary Hospital in Taxila, they said.
Saifi had assigned four groups to carry out his plans. Three had already successfully implemented part of the mission by targeting a church in Islamabad's diplomatic enclave on March 17, a Christian school near Murree on August 5 and a grenade attack on a chapel in Taxila four days later, a senior police investigator said.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, he said the six detained, who were arrested along with ten others on Wednesday from different parts of Punjab, told interrogators that they were also assigned to attack churches and US- and British-run missionary institutions in Lahore and Multan.
The six, who had arrived in Multan on August 1, were arrested from a rented house on information provided by Saifi, who was taken into custody after the attack in Taxila in which four nurses and of the attackers died.
Those detained on Wednesday said they had a list of churches and missionary institutions in Multan, the official said. "We conducted a survey of the installations and collected basic information about two churches in Multan," he quoted detainee Mohammad Azhar Shahid as saying.
The accused said they witnessed tight security at the two churches located in a military cantonment and the downtown Grass Market area, so decided to attack the Christian Hospital for Women in Multan.
Azhar told investigators he visited the hospital twice and collected information about the administration, staff, the arrival and departure of patients and the best escape route to take after completion of the mission.
The officer said the militants told police they received training in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. They said they were among 400 people - Pakistanis, Arabs and other nationalities including Kashmiris - who received military training in Afghanistan.
The militants allegedly told police they returned to Pakistan in early December last year when the Taliban militia was routed by Northern Alliance forces backed by US air strikes. On arrival here they contacted the outlawed Jaish-e-Mohammad group, but its militants refused to take part in terrorist attacks in Pakistan, the officer said.
Then they left for Karachi along with Saifi where they located Fazal Karim whom they had met several times in Afghanistan. "When we told them that we were short of money, Karim took us to a financier who provided them Rs 700,000 in instalments over the past five months," police quoted one of the detainees as saying.
Karim was arrested along with alleged sectarian terrorist Akram Lahori several months ago and remains in police custody in Karachi. The officer said the detained militants denied links with al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden. However, they said an Arab sometimes provided them money through Saifi. Investigators said they had also recovered a diary that had the name and telephone numbers of the group's financier and also seized fake identity cards. |
