PAKISTAN police have arrested three suspects linked to a Pakistani-American accused in New York of the attempted car bombing of Times Square.
The three were detained in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad two weeks ago and had been interrogated for several days, police said.
“It has been proved that they had links with Faisal Shahzad (the car-bombing suspect arrested in New York) and had transferred money to him,” said Bani Amin, operations police chief in Islamabad. “Today we have lodged a formal case against them,” said Amin, who named the three suspects as Shoaib Mughal, Mohammad Shahid and Hanbal Akhtar.
The United States said it was “gratified” with the arrests.
“We believe strongly that… Faisal Shahzad had help within Pakistan.
And we have worked very extensively and closely with Pakistani authorities,” US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said.
Amin said the three detained men had close links with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leaders Hakimullah Mehsud and Qari Hussain, whose organisation has claimed responsibility for Shahzad’s May 1 plot to bomb Times Square. Mehsud is the chief of the TTP and Hussain is a militant commander of a TTP faction known as “Ustad-e-Fidaeen,” which trains suicide bombers.
The TTP is based in Pakistan’s tribal badlands on the Afghan border and has been blamed for some of the deadliest suicide attacks in the nuclear-armed country. Pakistan acknowledged on July 26 that Shahzad had met the country’s Taliban commander and several other people. In June Shahzad pleaded guilty in a New York court to the Times Square car bombing attempt and warned that the United States faced similar attacks until it left Muslim lands.
Sky News broadcast a video in July showing Shahzad and Mehsud shaking hands, smiling and hugging some time before the failed May 1 attack. At the request of the United States Pakistan opened an investigation into possible links between Shahzad and militant groups. Pakistani-born Shahzad was pulled off a flight to Dubai two days after parking a car containing a bomb in Times Square.
He told a judge that he had undergone bomb-making training during a stay with the TTP in Pakistan between December 9 and January 25.
On returning to the United States, Shahzad said, he had planned the bombing and had acted alone, telling the judge: “Nobody helped me.”
Be the first to comment