The police arrested three suspects wanted in sectarian killings in Karachi on Wednesday while officials revealed that security forces arrested a leading Sunni Muslim militant accused of involvement in two failed assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf in Lahore last week. Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum, of the outlawed Lashkar-e-Jhangvi militant group, was arrested in late December in the eastern city of Lahore, said an intelligence official, who did not want to be identified. "He is amongst the top nine terrorists in the country and was also involved in the planning of two failed assassination attempts on President Musharraf," the official added, referring to attacks in Rawalpindi in December 2003.
Meanwhile the police raided a suspected militant hideout in southern Pakistan on Wednesday and arrested three suspects over recent sectarian killings, one of whom was allegedly planning a suicide attack, a government minister said. Authorities also seized weapons and bomb-making material in the raid on a home in Karachi, Rauf Sadiqui, the provincial interior minister, told a news conference. He said the men - all Pakistanis - were members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni Muslim militant group accused of killing hundreds of minority Shiites across the country in recent years. "They are dangerous people, and one of them was planning a suicide attack,â he said, but gave no other details. It was not clear when and where the man planned to carry out the attack, or who was his target. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is also accused of attacks on Westerners in Karachi and elsewhere, and some of its members are believed to have ties to Osama bin Ladenâs Al Qaeda network.