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| India-Pakistan |
| 'UK terror plot suspect was Jaish member before joining Al Qaeda' |
| 2006-08-17 |
| BAHAWALPUR: Rashid Rauf, identified by Pakistan as a key suspect in the alleged plot to blow up airliners bound for the US, was a member of a banned Pakistani militant organisation, Jaish-e-Mohammad, before he joined Al Qaeda, said a senior member of the organisation said on Wednesday. The father of Maulana Masood Azhar, head of the banned militant organisation fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, said that Rauf left Jaish-e-Mohammad to join rivals more interested in Al Qaeda's anti-Western message. "He was member of our group, but he left us and joined our rivals," Hafiz Allah Buksh said at Jaish's headquarters in Bahawalpur. "Our cause is Kashmir and their main cause is Afghanistan. They are anti-American, but we are not," Buksh added. Pakistani intelligence officials said Rauf was arrested in Bahawalpur on August 9, hours before British police detained 24 people suspected of being part of the alleged plot. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 "Our cause is Kashmir and their main cause is Afghanistan. They are anti-American, but we are not," Bullcrap. Pakistani propaganda to deflect attention. JeM and LeT are part of the Islamic Front formed by Osama. They are the same as al qaeda, no matter how much Perv and the ISI try to segregate them. From the latest TIME (notice the last line). One of the British suspects detained in Pakistan as part of the investigation into the alleged plot to blow up planes flying from Great Britain to the U.S. is connected to the militant Islamic leader Maulana Masood Azhar, one of India's most wanted terrorists. Azhar family members told TIME that the sister-in law of Rashid Rauf, 25, who Pakistani intelligence officers fingered early on as a "key suspect," is married to Azhar's brother. In a further link, the father of Rauf's wife and her sister runs Darul Uloom Madina, one of Pakistan's biggest and most hardline seminaries, with some 2,000 students, in Bahawalpur, Azhar's hometown. Rauf's arrest in Bahawalpur was one of the events that prompted British police to swoop in on the suspected London conspirators last Thursday, for fear they would become suspicious if they lost contact with such a central figure in their plans. Although Azhar, in his late 30s, is now in hiding, he continues to lead the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad, which is opposed to Indian rule of the disputed region of Kashmir and is said to have been behind the 2004 assassination attempt of President Pervez Musharraf and several other terror attacks. Azhar founded the group after he was released from an Indian prison in December 1999 in exchange for 155 passengers from a hijacked Indian airliner. Another prisoner released at the same time was Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, a militant close to Jaish-e-Muhammad who was subsequently convicted of abducting U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and sentencing him to death. At a rally in Karachi in January 2000 Azhar exhorted the crowd that "Muslims should not rest in peace until we have destroyed America and India." |
| Posted by: john 2006-08-17 07:50 |