Hayat said: "We have arrested close to a dozen militants including some foreigners and have aborted their plot to create widespread mayhem in the country… The security agencies have also recovered a large cache of sophisticated weapons which were to be used in the attacks." Some of the attacks were to be launched during the Independence Day celebrations. Hayat did not identify the arrested men but said some of them are suspected to have links with Osama bin Laden's terror network.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid told a news conference later yesterday that the conspiracy, if successful, could have killed hundreds. "These people were planning to carry out destructive and bloody terrorist attacks throughout the week starting on August 13," he said. Rashid added: "The group had planned to attack the president's (and) prime minister's houses, parliament, the US embassy in Islamabad and the military general headquarters in Rawalpindi. "We are looking for three or four more suspects in connection with the plot." The huge cache of weapons and ammunition recovered from the suspects included bombs, grenades, rockets, rocket launchers, detonators and around 50 explosive devices.
President Pervez Musharraf, a key US ally in the war on terror, is also the army chief and lives in the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, a garrison city where he survived two attempts on his life in December 2003. Hayat said the mastermind of these attacks was Egyptian Al Qaeda-linked operative Sheikh Esa alias Qari Ismail.
The interior minister said the leader of Islamabad's Lal Mosque, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, coordinated the planning. It was not clear whether he was among the arrested. Ghazi was already wanted in connection with a religious edict he and other clerics had issued a few months ago against military operations against Al-Qaeda fugitives in the northwestern tribal region near the Afghan border. He was the main link between Sheikh Esa and other men involved in the plot."
Since mid-July more than 60 Al-Qaeda suspects from different parts of the country have been taken into custody. Among those arrested were Al-Qaeda's Pakistani computer expert Naeem Noor Khan and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian suspected of involvement in the 1998 bombing of US embassies in East Africa. Information gleaned from the key operatives led to the disclosure of plots to launch attacks in Pakistan, the United States and Britain.
