Pakistani police arrested more than a dozen Islamist militants in the southern city of Karachi on Thursday after a fierce gun battle following a pre-dawn raid on their hideout, officials said. Two policemen were killed and nine wounded before the militants' resistance was broken after several hours of shooting.The raid came at a time when tensions were running high between Pakistan and India in the wake of a militant attack on the Indian city of Mumbai in November, and there is pressure from the international community for Pakistan to crack down harder on jihad groups. Pakistan has so far arrested 124 people belonging to banned groups. India has blamed the Pakistan-based Kashmiri militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), for the Mumbai assault in which 179 people were killed.
Interior ministry chief Rehman Malik, the country's point man on counterterrorism, said those arrested were members of an Islamic charity linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba. "We are very, very serious" about fighting extremism, Malik told a press conference, saying the anti-terror fight was the "only option" for Pakistan.
The people arrested are members of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, one of the country's biggest charities, but which is widely viewed as the political wing of LeT, banned here after an attack on the Indian parliament in late 2001.
The crackdown came in response to a United Nations Security Council resolution passed last month, describing Jamaat-ud-Dawa as a terror group.
Malik said that Islamabad needed more information from India in order to proceed with its own investigations into the Mumbai attacks and eventual prosecution of suspects.
"This is the time that Pakistan and India need to stick together," he said. "We'll be needing more information."