ISLAMABAD - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said an extremist gang arrested for a crude attempt to target him with rockets and a blast has possible links to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. General Musharraf, who has escaped at least four previous assassination attempts, said that the group aimed rockets at his residence in Islamabad and triggered an explosion near his army home in nearby Rawalpindi last week.“The perpetrators were all religious extremists, perhaps linked to a group having contacts with Al Qaeda, but they were not fully trained in carrying out such a task,” Thursday’s Dawn newspaper quoted him as telling journalists. “The attempt was real but the devices were so crude that they were bound to fail,” Musharraf added.
Musharraf first announced the detention of the alleged conspirators at a press conference on Wednesday night although he did not say at the time which group they were affiliated to. “We have caught the culprits. They are again extremists, unfortunately,” he said. “We have unearthed the whole gang. That is a success for our intelligence.” Asked by an AFP reporter if they had tried to kill him, he replied: “I can’t for sure say whether I was being targeted. Maybe I was.” “But I am not that easy a target,” he added.
Musharraf did not say how many suspects were caught.
Bomb disposal experts defused two Russian-made 107mm rockets near the presidentÂ’s official residence and the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad on October 5. Hours earlier, an explosion thought to have been a possible rocket rocked a public park near MusharrafÂ’s army residence in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, which adjoins Islamabad. There were no casualties.
Two rockets were also found on Saturday aimed at the headquarters of the countryÂ’s elite intelligence agency, the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence), apparently along a route MusharrafÂ’s motorcade uses.
Musharraf told Dawn that intelligence agencies quickly rounded up the suspects because cellphones were attached to the rockets as trigger devices, and that all the calls that were meant to launch them came from the same phone. The plotters planned to use the cellphonesÂ’ vibrators to activate batteries attached to the rockets but only managed to detonate one, Musharraf said. He did not specify which attempt this related to.
The rockets did not have proper barrels attached and so would never have been able to hit a target accurately, he added.