Premature leak may have allowed Amjad Faruqui to escape

Premature leak may have allowed Amjad Faruqui to escape

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Mazhar Abbas and Hasan Mansoor
Police says it is taking precautions to pre-empt any reprisal attack by militant groups


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Police transporting eight suspected Al Qaeda activists to an anti-terrorism court in Karachi in armoured personal carriers


Ministers Faisal (left) and
Rashid (right) at the joint press conference in Islamabad. Minister Rashid’s premature
leak might have allowed some militants to escape the police net

The manner in which information on the capture of some activists of the Jandallah group was disseminated to the press indicates there are growing differences between the ministries of interior and information.

Senior officials told TFT they believe the premature ‘official leak’ on the arrest of Al Qaeda-linked Jandallah militants, suspected of ambushing June 10 the convoy of Karachi corps commander, forewarned other members of the group, including Amjad Farooqi. “They managed to get out before we could put the net effectively around them,” says an official familiar with the case.

The controversy started last Friday when federal information minister, Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed, told reporters that eight militants had been arrested in connection with the attack on corps commander.

According to well-placed sources, Minister Rashid did not inform the interior ministry that he was going to disclose the information to the press. Indeed, as one source put it, the interior ministry was keeping the information under wraps to give the law enforcement personnel enough time to go in for the bigger fish.

“The interior ministry was completely taken by surprise,” says an insider. For its part the Sindh police denied it informed the information ministry with details of the arrests. This makes sense as one Sindh police source put it: “We were trying to close the net around these people so it makes no sense that someone here would have leaked the information prematurely.”

This naturally begs the question as to why the two ministries have failed so far to coordinate their actions. Indeed, why did Minister Rashid not check with his counterpart, Minister Hayat about whether he was supposed to come on-line with the information about the arrests? “We failed to catch other suspected militants as a direct result of the information minister’s statement,” a police source told TFT on condition of anonymity.

And what began as perhaps a comedy of errors deteriorated into a complete farce when police chief Kamal Shah and DIG Tariq Jamil repeatedly denied the arrests even after the information minister had gone public.

For his part, the interior minister then decided to hold a joint press conference with the information minister last Sunday. This, say police sources, only worsened the matters.

The two ministries issued a joint statement claiming that 13 people had been arrested including eight foreigners, mostly Uzbeiks and Chechens. “We were shocked to hear this statement as we knew that only one foreigner had been arrested and that was not on terrorist-related charges. He was merely detained on suspicion of not holding valid travel documents,” the police source added. It was only later that the interior minister denied any foreigners were arrested in the raids in Karachi.

Interestingly, this is not the first time the information ministry has disclosed the arrest of Al Qaeda activists without first clearing it with the interior ministry. Last year, when seven foreign militants linked to Al Qaeda were arrested in Karachi, Rashid promptly issued a public statement without consulting Hayat.

Sources told TFT the interior ministry plans to make a formal complaint over continued interference by the information ministry in its affairs.

Some insiders have an interesting theory on this lack of coordination. “The information minister wants to steal the media limelight and in doing that ends up jumping the gun,” says a source in Islamabad.

Meanwhile, the war on terror seems to have closer to Pakistan more than before. There has been trouble in Karachi in the south and South Waziristan in the north. In fact, it is now clear that there is a linkage between events in South Waziristan where the army is trying to flush out Taliban-Al Qaeda elements and Karachi where Al Qaeda-linked groups are trying to target high-value targets.

Some successes have been notched: in Wana in SW, the army has managed to kill quite a few foreigners linked to Al Qaeda; down in Karachi the police managed to bust the Jandallah group and also claimed to have arrested Musabir Urumchi, nephew of top Al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, (one of the chief planners of the 9/11 attacks). All these people, according to the police, have been arrested in connection with last Thursday’s attack on the Karachi corps commander’s convoy.

Urumchi has since been handed over to an intelligence agency, most likely the ISI, while the eight members of Jandallah were produced before an anti-terrorism court last Monday. They will remain in police custody for another fortnight.

The head of Jandallah, Attaur Rehman (aliases Ibrahim, Umer and Tahir) and his deputy, Shahzad Ahmed Bajwa (alias Umer), were among those remanded in police custody.

“Following our questioning of the suspects, we have now ascertained that there are at least 20 members of this group. Half of them belong to the militant wing while the other half carry out administrative duties. We are pursuing the group’s remaining twelve members,” Sindh police chief Kamal Shah told TFT.

Shah revealed that the Jandallah members went to Wana in October and November of last year where they received training from and fought alongside Al Qaeda operatives against Pakistani forces.

An investigating officer told TFT that the group’s members were forced to return to Karachi after military operations intensified in Wana. Upon their return they formed the group and decided to hit targets in Karachi. IGP Shah thinks the emergence of more such groups in Karachi cannot be ruled out.

Jandallah defines its objectives as attacking Western targets and Pakistan’s own security forces to avenge what they perceive as President Musharraf’s policy u-turn on Afghanistan and his campaign to eradicate Al Qaeda-linked fighters from its northwest border regions.

Police sources say Attaur Rehman, one of the members who has a Masters in Statistics from Karachi University, told senior investigator Fayyaz Leghari: “You have sold your pride and honour to please the Americans and we will take revenge from you and your masters”.

Police were able to trace the group when five of their members booked a 16-seater Toyota van in Gulistan-e-Jauhar to take them to Hyderabad. The group then seized control of the vehicle from the driver. They later used the same van to carry out the attack on the Karachi corps commander.

With the help of the driver of the rented vehicle, the police were then able to form a profile of the five suspects, all of whom were Urdu-speaking. The authorities were able to later locate the areas from where other vehicles had been stolen and then used in several high-profile attacks: the first being in January 15 when a car bomb exploded outside the Holy Trinity Bridge, injuring 35 people. Most of the injured were policemen and paramilitary Rangers.

Vehicles had also been stolen from Bahadurabad, Gulshan-e-Iqbal, and upscale Defence Housing Authority in the city’s southern and eastern parts and were later used in terrorist attacks: a double car bomb blast near the United States’ consul general’s residence on May 26; a car bomb blast outside the Defence Golf Club where Indian singer Sonu Nigam’s was performing in concert on April 10; the killing of five policemen inside Gulistan-e-Jauhar police station on April 4; an attack on a paramilitary Rangers’ van on March 19; the group was also responsible for abandoning an explosive-laden vehicle outside the US consulate building on March 15 and a car bomb blast outside the Holy Trinity Church.

Investigators say Jandallah may have contacts with Al Alami as well as the five-member conglomeration of jihadi and sectarian groups, Brigade 313, of which Al Alami is a part. Lashkar-e Tayba, Jaish-e Mohammad, Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi are the other four members of Brigade 313.

“We are on standby alert for imminent retaliation from the Jandallah remnants or their possible allies in Brigade 313,” a senior police officer told TFT on condition of anonymity.

Intelligence sources believe that Pakistan’s most wanted militant Amjad Farooqi, a key suspect in the December attack on President Musharraf, may have been in contact with Attaur Rehman.

With regard to the terror groups’ hierarchy, investigators believe Jandallah is second to Al Alami, an offshoot of the banned Harkatul Mujahideen.

Al Alami (HMA) only recently became prominent when on July 8, 2002 the Rangers’ Field Security Wing raided two different apartment buildings in central Karachi’s Gole Market area and arrested the head of Harkatul Mujahideen and his second-in-command.

Al Alami also claimed responsibility for the abortive attempt on General Pervez Musharraf’s life in April 2002 and the suicide bombing of the US Consulate. The police and Rangers arrested 24 HMA activists in 2002. This year the police has already arrested another 28 activists associated with the group. However, the authorities believe that about forty more of the groups affiliates remain at large, including Saud Memon, who provided police with sufficient information to recover the remains of slain US reporter Daniel Pearl from a shallow grave on May 17, 2002.