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| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| Pakistani Taliban among Musharraf plotters |
| 2005-05-08 |
| Pakistani Taliban veterans, once held in a notorious Afghan jail where hundreds of their comrades died, were part of a foiled plot to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf, intelligence officials said on Saturday. Despite official denials that any fresh attempt to kill Musharraf had been uncovered during a series of al Qaeda linked arrests over the past couple of weeks, intelligence officers insisted nearly a dozen people detained had planned a hit. Musharraf narrowly survived two al Qaeda inspired attempts on his life in December 2003, and another plot against him was thwarted in the southern port city of Karachi in early 2002. On Monday, Pakistani security forces, acting on information from U.S. agents, caught Libyan Abu Faraj Farj al Liby. President George Bush described Liby as one of Osama bin Laden's top generals, and his capture fired up hopes that investigators might soon zero-in on the al Qaeda leader or his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri. Pakistan says Liby planned the attacks on Musharraf. Though Liby is still being interrogated, sources say it was the recapture last week of Mushtaq Ahmed, who escaped custody in December after being sentenced to death for his role in one the assassination attempts that unleashed the follow-up arrests. When the arrests took place remains hazy. But ten suspects, said to have been targeting Musharraf, were seized close to the eastern city of Lahore sometime in the last two weeks. On Friday, security forces caught four al Qaeda-linked suspects in Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province (NWFP), intelligence sources said. Liby and up to four other accomplices were run to ground elsewhere in NWFP, and eight more were caught in the province. Its own ranks decimated in the last four years, al Qaeda has increasingly relied on Pakistani militants who share its world view to act as foot soldiers. "There's a lot of individuals now locked in a grim personal struggle for revenge," said a retired Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistan's military intelligence, who believes his successors made a tactical error in breaking up militant organisations they once held some sway over. Intelligence officials said several suspects arrested near Lahore belonged to Sunni Muslim militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, and some were once prisoners of feared Afghan commander General Abdul Rashid Dostum after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Al Liby's network recruited several Pakistani Taliban released by Afghanistan, who returned home embittered by what they saw as Musharraf's betrayal of the Islamist cause. "They were from the second batch of prisoners freed from Afghanistan's Shiberghan prison," one official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. "On their return to Pakistan, they were jailed here for a few weeks and then cleared and freed by the agencies," he said. A suicide car bomber in one of the attacks on Musharraf was a Kashmiri who had been Dostum's prisoner, according to sources. Dostum, a military adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was cited for war crimes by rights groups, after hundreds of Taliban fighters reportedly perished -- suffocated inside sealed shipping containers -- at Shiberghan prison. Dostum survived a Taliban suicide bomb attack in January. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |