KARACHI, Pakistan — Five years after most senior al-Qaeda leaders are thought to have fled this port city, officials in Karachi worry that the organization is regrouping and finding new support here and in neighboring Afghanistan. They are especially concerned about the recruitment of potential foot soldiers for the next major terrorist attack.
The resurgence has been managed by a South Asian offshoot called al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), created by al-Qaeda’s top leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2014 in order to slow advances by rival Islamic State militants in the region.
Initially, AQIS struggled to gain traction in Pakistan — it has been the principal target of President Obama’s drone-strike strategy in the country’s northwestern tribal belt. But AQIS is now finding its footing in southern Pakistan, powered by fresh recruits and budding alliances with other militant organizations.
“They are making a comeback of sorts,” said Saifullah Mehsud, executive director of the FATA Research Center, which monitors militant groups. “But it’s a different, more localized al-Qaeda.”
After the fall of Afghanistan’s Taliban government in 2001, many al-Qaeda leaders spilled into northwest Pakistan or attempted to blend in in Karachi, a bustling city of more than 20 million residents. A significant number of those core leaders were eventually killed or captured, or fled to the Middle East, officials said.
But the formation of AQIS is again allowing al-Qaeda to tap into Karachi’s wealth and network of madrassas in search of recruits and technical expertise — and sparking deadly clashes with Pakistani security forces.
“The core al-Qaeda, the thinkers and planners, are not coming to the front right now, but they are giving directions, and . . . the local boys are going in big numbers,” said one counterterrorism official in Karachi who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
While Pakistani officials remain confident that al-Qaeda probably can’t pull off another 9/11-style attack on the United States, there is concern that the group is, as one official put it, “planning something big.” The official added that it is unclear, however, whether such an attack would be aimed at Pakistan, another country in South Asia or the West.
Those concerns mirror assessments from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, where there are also signs that elements of al-Qaeda are trying to come together. A 30-square-mile training camp was discovered in Kandahar province in October, and last month U.S. and Afghan special operations forces freed a kidnapped Pakistani from an al-Qaeda-linked camp in Paktia province.
“They are looking to nestle in with the Taliban so they have some level of sanctuary,” said Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, chief spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. “Ultimately, what we think al-Qaeda gets out of this relationship is, if the Taliban can provide them some ungoverned space, that allows al-Qaeda space to really conduct their global operations.”
In Pakistan, officials say al-Qaeda is also re-adapting through enhanced alliances with established militant groups, including the Sunni-dominated Pakistani Taliban and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a sectarian group that had been focused on attacking Shiite Muslims.
The coordination comes as Pakistan’s military has stepped up its operations against various militant groups, prompting them to seek out support from al-Qaeda “for survival,” said one Pakistani law enforcement official who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.
But officials say that the threat from al-Qaeda extends far beyond Sunni militant groups rebranding themselves. Instead, they say, al-Qaeda is finding new recruits from some unlikely Karachi neighborhoods.
Although ethnic Pashtuns and foreign fighters have historically formed the backbone of al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, some ethnic Bengalis and other Urdu-speaking Mohajirs — Muslims who migrated to Pakistan from India after the 1947 partition — are also being lured into the group, officials said.
“They are not into this factional fighting, or fighting with other sects or Shiites, but they will go for enforcement of sharia law overall” and be drawn to al-Qaeda sermons against the West, the official said.
Counterterrorism officials in Karachi have a list of several hundred active al-Qaeda members, which makes them assume there are at least a few thousand on the streets.
In Karachi, AQIS has divided itself into three operational segments — recruitment, financial and tactical — made up of four-to-six-person cells.
The recruitment cells work in madrassas and schools, casually preaching Islam before targeting certain students for potential recruitment, officials said.
“Nobody may even know it’s al-Qaeda operating,” said Saad Khan, a retired Pakistani intelligence officer.
Cells solicit local businesses for donations, often under the guise of supporting Islamic charities, officials said. Officials have no estimates for how much money al-Qaeda raises from relatively wealthy Karachi but said that militants are often found carrying hundreds of dollars in cash.
“They are being told they don’t need to do any job and they don’t need to indulge in petty crimes,” the counterterrorism official said. “But they are told they have to remain very discreet.”
Although such discretion complicates the work of counterterrorism officials, they think that the Karachi cells are just spokes in a broader operation centered near Pakistan’s southwestern border with Afghanistan or Iran.
From Karachi, AQIS tactical cells ferry money and messages to that general area, often moving through Quetta, which is also where part of the Afghan Taliban leadership resides, officials said. From Quetta, militants cross the border into Afghanistan but appear to have little knowledge about al-Qaeda’s broader ambitions or tactics in the region, intelligence officials said.
“The people we come into contact with say they go to Afghanistan but are put into a small corner and remain there and can’t go out,” the Pakistani counterterrorism official said. “Then they get direction from there, from another Pakistani, and return.”
In Pakistan, officials said AQIS has been linked to just one major attempted terrorist attack — an effort two years ago to hijack a Pakistani navy vessel from the port of Karachi.
The attack was foiled, but five Pakistani navy officers were convicted of helping to orchestrate the operation, according to media reports.
AQIS militants have also been linked to several recent police killings in Karachi. Officials say they are targeted revenge attacks or the early stages of a larger plot to try to weaken the morale of security forces.
“What still makes al-Qaeda different and more dangerous from other militant groups is a disciplined management system,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Peshawar-based expert on militants. “Another dangerous thing is they are always looking to penetrate into the armed forces looking for sympathy.”
U.S. intelligence officials have worried for years about potential links between al-Qaeda and rogue Pakistani military officials. That Osama bin Laden was found hiding near a Pakistan military training academy did little to allay their suspicions.
Pakistani security and intelligence agencies, however, seem to have no tolerance for the modern-day al-Qaeda. “We don’t go for arrests,” the counterterrorism official said. “We just search through their computer, their things, and then neutralize them.”
Last month, police in Pakistan’s Punjab province reported killing 14 al-Qaeda militants, including the group’s leader there, over two days in “encounters” with police. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported that the suspects had been in police custody for four months before they died.
Saad Muhammad, a retired Pakistani general, said Pakistan’s military is determined not to allow AQIS to jeopardize its recent gains against Islamist militant groups.
“You can’t say they will be totally naked, but they will not be able to gain strength in any significant way,” Muhammad said.
But Syed Tahir Hussain Mashhadi, a retired Pakistani army colonel and sitting senator, said the real concern remains how a city such as Karachi fits into al-Qaeda’s broader global ambitions. The answer to that, he said, remains murky.
“Al-Qaeda is just an umbrella, and the top of the pyramid is what is controlling and enduring,” he said. “They don’t have to put much effort into Pakistan because all they have to do is pick up all these existing, bloodthirsty splinter organizations and they have a ready-made killing machine.”
Nisar Mehdi in Karachi, Aamir Iqbal in Peshawar and Antonio Olivo in Kabul contributed to this report.
Saad Aziz (Credit: ISPR)It was a 9mm gun, probably a Stoeger. Before Saad Aziz got this “samaan” through an associate, by his own admission, he had already plotted a murder. On the evening of Friday, April 24, 2015, he met four other young men, all well-educated like him, somewhere on Karachi’s Tariq Road to finalise and carry out the plot. As dusk deepened into night, they set off towards Defence Housing Society Phase II Extension on three motorcycles. Their destination: a café-cum-communal space – The Second Floor or T2F – where an event, Unsilencing Balochistan: take two, was under way. Their target: Sabeen Mahmud, 40, the founder and director of T2F.
Two of Aziz’s associates, he says, “were just roaming around in the vicinity of T2F”. A third was keeping an eye on the street outside. Aziz himself was riding a motorcycle driven by one Aliur Rehman, also mentioned as Tony in the police record. When he received the message that Mahmud had left T2F, he says, he followed her. “Suzuki Swift, AWH 541,” he repeats her car’s make and registration number.
As the car stopped at a signal less than 500 metres to the north of T2F, “Tony rode up alongside it.” Mahmud was in the driving seat, Aziz says. “Next to her was her mother, I think. That is what we found out from the news later. There was a man sitting in the back. I fired the gun four or five times at her.”
“There wasn’t one particular reason to target her; she was generally promoting liberal, secular values. There were those campaigns of hers, the demonstration outside Lal Masjid [in Islamabad], Pyaar ho jaane do (let there be love) on Valentine’s Day and so on.”
Sitting in a sparsely furnished room within Karachi Police’s Crime Investigation Department (CID), Aziz appears at ease even in blindfold. Recounting the events of that evening, he never sounds hurried or under duress.
After shooting Mahmud, he says he and Tony turned left from the signal towards Punjab Chowrangi and reached Sharae-e-Faisal, crossing Teen Talwar in Clifton on their way. While still on the motorcycle, he messaged others to get back to Tariq Road. Once there, he just picked up his motorcycle and they all dispersed. “We only got confirmation of her death later from the news,” he says. “At that moment [of shooting], there is no way of confirming if the person is dead. You just do it and get out of there.”
It was on February 13, 2015, when he says he decided that Mahmud had to die. That evening, he was at T2F, attending an event, The Karachi “Situation”: Exploring Responses. “It was something she said during the talk,” he recalls. “That we shouldn’t be afraid of the Taliban, we should stand up to them, demonstrate against them, something like that. That is when we made up our minds.” Later in the conversation, though, he adds, “There wasn’t one particular reason to target her: she was generally promoting liberal, secular values. There were those campaigns of hers, the demonstration outside Lal Masjid [in Islamabad], Pyaar ho jaane do (let there be love) on Valentine’s Day and so on.” He laughs softly, almost bashfully, as he mentions the last.
Aziz remembers visiting The Karachi “Situation” seminar with Tony who, the police say, remains on the run. Pictures and video footage of the event show Aziz sitting at the end of a row, close to the entrance. Next to him is Tony, a round-faced young man with a dark complexion. The police say he is an engineering graduate from the National University of Sciences and Technology, Rawalpindi campus. “Tony had a Twitter account under a fake name and he used to follow Sabeen’s tweets very closely,” says Aziz. He also mentions another source of information. “About four weeks [after the discussion on Karachi], when I got emails about events being held there, I sent Tony there a few times to check if her car was there. It wasn’t.”
On April 24, 2015, Aziz says, he told Tony to go there again. “When he confirmed her car was there, we made the plan there and then.”
By that time, he confesses, he had taken part in 20 major and minor “operations” in Karachi. These include an attack – just eight days before Mahmud’s assassination – on American academic Debra Lobo, who taught at a college in Karachi, bank heists to put together money for their hit-and-run activities, multiple attempts to target the police and the Rangers and grenade attacks on co-education schools in Gulshan-e-Iqbal (on February 3, 2015) and North Nazimabad (on March 18, 2015).
Nineteen days after Mahmud’s murder, Aziz says he took part in an attack that elicited worldwide shock and condemnation: the assassination of 43 members of the Ismaili Shia community, including women and children, travelling in a bus in the Safoora Goth area on the outskirts of Karachi.
Aziz appears as a mild-mannered young man of medium height and build, with a trimmed beard. He makes a little joke about how he can instantly tell which law enforcement or intelligence agency the person asking him questions belongs to. “The first thing the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] want to know is whether there are any links with RAW [the Indian intelligence agency]; CID is interested in the funding aspect; and the police keep hammering on about what other wardaat (hits) we’ve been involved in.”
Aziz calls himself a Salafi, though his father says the family follows Sunni, not Salafi, Islam. When an interrogator asks him why he and his associates targeted Ismaili Shias, he cites their sectarian affiliation as the reason. “It is perfectly acceptable to take the lives of women and children for that reason.”
Aziz’s radicalisation began in 2009, following a visit to Saudi Arabia for umrah with his family. Upon his return to Pakistan, he decided to read translations of the Quran. “Until then I had only read it once in Arabic.” (One investigator, however, reports that Aziz could not recite certain Quranic verses that every practising Muslim recites at least once a day during Isha prayers.)
For a while, he joined the Tableeghi Jamaat. Then, he took to attending lectures by a scholar, Shaykh Kamaluddin Ahmed, a professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums) at the time, whose Sufi interpretation of Islam is distinct from what the Tableeghi Jamaat stands for. “But neither [Ahmed] nor Tableeghi Jamaat even discussed jihad,” he says. “It was over time, primarily through reading the Quran, that I developed an inclination towards jihad.”
Aziz then met Tony, whom he suspected had contacts with militants. Tony made him wait for some time before introducing him to one Haris, an al-Qaeda operative. “[Haris] was heading al-Qaeda’s daawati (recruitment) wing for Pakistan at the time. I joined this wing at the end of 2010,” says Aziz.
In September 2013, Haris, whose real name is said to be Abu Zar, was arrested from a hostel of the Punjab University in Lahore, along with two others, for alleged links with al-Qaeda. In the last 22 months, the authorities have not produced him in any court of law for a trial. Police sources in Lahore say Haris and his associates are in ISI’s custody. This information, however, could not be confirmed through other sources.
In 2011, Aziz went to Waziristan for training where, he says, he was attached to a group headed by Ahmad Farooq, deputy head of al-Qaeda in the subcontinent and a former student of Punjab University. (Farooq was killed in an American drone strike in January 2015 in North Waziristan.)
By 2013, Aziz says he was disillusioned and frustrated. Instead of allowing him take part in terrorist operations, his handler Haris limited him to media duties — such as managing online jihadist publications. “In mid-2013, I met Haider Abbas,” says Aziz. Abbas introduced him to Tahir Minhas alias Saeen, identified by the police as a member of al-Qaeda.
As a senior, experienced commander, Minhas set the ground rules for the group that Aziz joined. “We all used aliases; I only know Tony by his real name,” says Aziz. He got his own alias — Tin Tin. “None of us would ask for the members’ real names, addresses or anything that could identify them in case one of us was arrested. That was on Minhas’s instructions.”
The cell had no designated ‘safe house’ to meet. Minhas often called its members for meetings to Jan Japan Motors, a car auction site on the Super Highway. He also selected the targets. The attack on Mahmud, though, was different. Aziz says it was on his own initiative. “Tahir wasn’t even there that day.”
In 2014, the sudden ascendancy of the Islamic State (IS) and its territorial gains in Iraq and Syria became a lightning rod for militants across the globe. In January this year, IS announced its expansion into Khorasan, a historical region comprising parts of present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and some Central Asian countries. Several factions of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) immediately joined it.
“We just finished a 16-day joint investigation but we have not established any direct or indirect link between him and Daesh. Al-Qaeda’s tentacles, however, touch him in multiple ways. We are sure he is with al-Qaeda.”
“Among my acquaintances there was already a lot of discussion about the merits of al-Qaeda and Daesh [the Arabic acronym for IS]. Many of us felt that al-Qaeda was reduced to mainly talk and little action,” Aziz says. “We were in Waziristan when the creation of the [IS’s] Khorasan [chapter] was announced, and we pledged loyalty to its emir, [former TTP commander] Hafiz Saeed Khan.” (A senior official of the Intelligence Bureau in Peshawar says Khan was “in Tor Dara area in Khyber Agency’s Tirah valley in January 2015”, the time period to which Aziz refers.)
Subsequently, he says, some of his associates did pro-IS wall chalking and left propaganda pamphlets in parts of Karachi, especially at the scenes of some of the attacks they carried out. Some of the people working with him, he claims, have gone to Syria as part of an effort to strengthen their connection with the IS leadership there.
Weeks after Mahmud’s murder, Jaadu, her white Persian cat, would sit expectantly by the door of her house for hours every evening, waiting for a familiar footfall on the steps outside. Inside, her mother, Mahenaz Mahmud, sits on a chair looking like her daughter might have 20 years in the future — had she had that much time. The mother also exudes the same warmth, intelligence and artlessness as the daughter — and, since Mahmud’s death, a stoicism that would move a stone to tears.
“On April 24, Sabeen made breakfast for us (Mahenaz and Mahenaz’s mother) as usual. That was her routine. She would switch on the kettle, run to her computer, then she would put the bread in the toaster,” Mahenaz recalls with a chuckle. “She didn’t want me to have a cold slice, so she would toast the second slice only after I had finished the first.” They would usually chat away during breakfasts. “We would talk about all kinds of things.” Sometimes, Mahmud would seek her mother’s advice. “She would ask me what I thought of something being done at T2F. Sometimes we would flog some philosophical concept. We would share articles, then discuss them… there was lots that we talked about.”
That day, though, Mahenaz sensed something unusual. “I don’t know whether it was anxiety but there was some element about this Baloch missing people event, especially because of the talk that was cancelled at LUMS [under orders from the ISI],” she says. Mahmud was not moderating the session; she hadn’t even organised it. “Someone else wanted to do it and she had agreed to provide the space,” says Mahenaz. “But she talked to some people about it and then said to me “It’ll be ok, Amma””.
After breakfast, the mother went to work – she is an academic programmes advisor at a teacher training institute – but planned to attend the talk on the Baloch missing persons. “I hadn’t been to any event for a long time because I get quite exhausted by the evening but that day I had a very strong feeling that I must be around her.”
Following the event, around 9pm, Mahmud was planning to drop her mother home, pick up a friend and go to another friend’s place for dinner. “When Sabeen came out [of T2F], I remember she was in a hurry, and she told the driver to sit in the back. I got in the seat next to her and we drove off.”
A short distance away, the Sunset Boulevard traffic signal turned red and their car came to a stop. “It is impossible for me to process those five, 10 seconds,” Mahenaz says quietly. “I was talking to Sabeen, and my face was turned towards her. She was looking in front. A motorcycle came up along the side she was sitting, much too close for comfort. My eyes became riveted on a gun in someone’s hand. I said to Sabeen, “What do you think he wants? He’s got a gun.” I thought it was a mugging. All this must have taken only three or four seconds. Then the window shattered, and Sabeen’s head just tilted to one side; her eyes were open. There was not a moan, not a groan, not a whimper. Then pandemonium broke out around us.”
Mahmud was shot five times. Her mother also took two bullets: one in her back and another that, after going through Mahmud’s body, went into her arm and out again. She says she remembers feeling there was something “happening with my body but I wasn’t sure what.” She was too focussed on her daughter to be sure of anything else. “I was saying ‘Sabeen talk to me, give me some indication that you can hear what I am saying.’ Even though I knew that she had gone, somewhere there was a glimmer of hope.”
She herself was taken to the Aga Khan University Hospital for treatment. “Next morning, I started demanding that I wanted to go home. I was told that Sabeen’s body was being kept in a morgue and I thought she should be put on the way to her last journey immediately.” With a bullet still lodged in her back, she left the hospital to bury her only child.
When Mahenaz Mahmud learnt that the police had arrested some educated young men for carrying out the murder, it was a shock to her, almost a betrayal of some of her most closely held convictions. “I felt terrified. I am a person who teaches my students that we all have our biases and that we put people into boxes because we don’t have time to find out about each and every person.”
In the third week of June, T2F organised a qawwali session to celebrate her daughter’s birthday posthumously. While observing the audience from the back of the room, she couldn’t shake off a nagging thought. “I was looking at the young boys in the audience and wondering, ‘So what are they thinking? What is really going on in their head?’ Normally I wouldn’t have thought that about young people. I would be happy that all kinds of young people come to T2F. Now I am really scared about how these young men’s minds can be messed with.”
The senselessness of the murder is difficult for her to process. “I want to ask them, why? What happened to you? What was it that bothered you about Sabeen? Was it something she stood for? Did you just want to make an example out of her? Did you think that taking a human life is such a small matter? But then I realise that these people think very differently. Their paradigms are different. Their schemas are different.”
In another part of Karachi, sitting in her home studio, architect Marvi Mazhar, one of Mahmud’s closest friends, says: “I always knew. I always thought that if someone gets to her, it’ll be someone educated. Sabeen had to deal with a lot of hate speech, and from people who were all educated. They used to write, they used to tweet, they were all very tech-savvy. Every time she’d complain that these young bachas, I wish I could have chai with them, talk to them.”
Mazhar recalls an incident from last November. At the Creative Karachi Festival organised by T2F, the azan went unnoticed for a few moments in the hubbub and a young man angrily demanded that the music be stopped instantly. “Sabeen went up to the guy, took him aside and spoke to him for a while; a little later, he actually brought flowers for her by way of apology. There was this strange magic about her,” she says with a wistful smile.
In the days leading up to her death, Mahmud was particularly restless, says Mazhar. On Tuesday, April 21, there was a get-together of friends at Mazhar’s place where Mahmud was “a little agitated”. Mazhar heard her saying to someone on the phone, “If we are not going to do it now, then we won’t do it because after that I am leaving for London and I don’t have time.” She assumes this was about the talk on Baloch missing persons. “Her heart was not into this talk, mainly because she had so much going on otherwise. She believed in it, she believed that the Baloch must be given a platform. But, I felt, judging from the conversations I have had with her, she was waiting for a signal, waiting for someone to tell her not to do this.”
A sturdy metal barrier bars entry into a rough stretch at the end of Beaumont Road in Karachi’s Civil Lines. Only a few street lights illuminate the area; that, along with the dilapidated condition of the road, is perhaps deliberate, designed to make things a little more difficult for terrorists looking to target the CID headquarters that looms up on the right, after the barrier. They did exactly that on November 10, 2010, killing at least 17 people and injuring over 100 in a massive truck bombing. Access inside the CID premises now lies behind a raft of concrete barriers, designed to minimise the possibility of another attack.
Raja Umar Khattab, Senior Superintendent Police, strides into his office at around 10.30pm after taraweeh prayers. A stocky, barrel-chested man, he is wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with khaki pants, rolled up at the bottom and rubber slippers. He speaks in rapid-fire sentences; names of terrorists roll off his tongue like those of old acquaintances. Several phone calls interrupt conversation; a senior official has misplaced his cell phone and Khattab is trying to get it traced. “Sir, don’t worry. I’ll make sure it is back with you soon,” he says reassuringly.
As the CID’s lead investigator, Khattab is flushed with pride over the recent arrest of what he calls a major terrorist cell. He has no doubt the police under him have the men who killed Mahmud and committed the Safoora Goth massacre, apart from various other crimes.
Khattab believes it was a failed romantic relationship that sowed the seed for Aziz’s radicalisation.
The Sindh Rangers, too, have made a separate claim of arresting a mastermind of the attack on Ismaili Shias. “He has nothing to do with Safoora Goth incident; he never did,” says Khattab, shaking his head vigorously, when asked about the man arrested by the Rangers and reportedly linked to the detained office-bearers of the Fishermen’s Co-Operative Society. “When you go to a court to seek remand, you put in extra things. Otherwise it can get difficult to get a remand,” is how he explains the reason for the claim made by the Rangers.
More importantly, Aziz’s claim about his allegiance with IS meets with a similarly dismissive response. “We just finished a 16-day joint investigation but we have not established any direct or indirect link between him and Daesh. Al-Qaeda’s tentacles, however, touch him in multiple ways. We are sure he is with al-Qaeda,” says Khattab.
“And why should it be so surprising that these terrorists are so educated? There were always educated people in al-Qaeda. Educated people don’t join TTP. It is the madrasa-educated ones who join TTP. They have the desire for jihad but these [educated jihadis] are ideologues. They envision grander things,” he adds. And for that reason, Khattab states, they are far more dangerous: They can be anywhere — the shopping mall, the university, saying their prayers beside you.
Khattab believes it was a failed romantic relationship that sowed the seed for Aziz’s radicalisation. “He became disillusioned with worldly pursuits,” says the police officer. “When he joined Unilever for an internship [in the second half of 2010], he met Aliur Rehman – alias Tony – who was also working there.” Tony, a member of Dr Israr Ahmed’s Lahore-based Islamic movement, Tanzeem-e-Islami, was to play a vital role in Aziz’s radicalisation, inspiring him to fight for a Muslim caliphate, says the police officer.
But it was Minhas, the police claim, who turned Aziz into what he has become. In Khattab’s words: “Saad says Tahir motivated him so much that he no longer has any fear of killing people. His role in targeted killings was that of the shooter; by my reckoning, he has killed about 20 people.”
CID officials maintain that the terrorist group of which Aziz was a member had split from a larger al-Qaeda formation eight to 10 months ago. “While Tahir is its askari (militant) commander, he in turn answers to Abdullah Yousuf, who is in Helmand, Afghanistan. The other group formed by this rupture is led by Haji Sahib, Ramzi Yousef’s older brother,” says Khattab. He believes the crime spree by Aziz’s group, which hadn’t yet given itself a name, was aimed at raising its profile within the terrorist fraternity so that someone “owned” it.
Tracking down the group, he says, was not easy. They operated under aliases, did not use mobile phones and, instead, employed a Wi-Fi-based application called Talkray to communicate. The CID first picked up their trail sometime in 2014 through some men who were in prison, Khattab says. Based on the information obtained from them – he does not quite elaborate how but only says “we did some working on them” – the police picked up two former Karachi University students who had joined al-Qaeda through contacts at the campus and whose job was to maintain the organisation’s website. “We soon figured out that there is a network of educated al-Qaeda members in Gulistan-e-Jauhar, Gulshan-e-Iqbal and other areas around Karachi University,” he says.
The clues led the police to a sports teacher at Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, who had set up a laboratory in his house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal where, along with his son and nephew, he used to teach young men to assemble Improvised Explosive Devices. The police also found a lot of written material that led them to conclude that a large al-Qaeda group was active in Karachi. “We found out it had two wings — one askari and one daawati.” The police do not divulge whether or not they have arrested and interrogated the teacher or, for that matter, any other details about his identity and whereabouts.
While investigating the people arrested earlier, the police learnt that Minhas was the group’s commander. Born in a village in the Jhelum district of Punjab, Minhas is a resident of Kotri, near Hyderabad, and has been in and out of police’s hands since 2007. According to an official source, one looking very closely into the massacre of Ismaili Shias, Minhas, (a matriculate, according to this source), had a thriving poultry business in Kotri at one point. He is also, says the same source, rabidly anti-Shia and has been a member of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned organisation involved in hundreds of acts of sectarian and religious terrorism.
Khattab and his team of investigators describe Minhas as a highly sophisticated militant, with his own signature style. They claim to have discovered important similarities in the terrorist activities he has carried out: in all of these, silencer-fitted imported Glock, Caracal and Stoeger pistols are used; he and his associates always hit their targets in the head. “By the time the Safoora Goth massacre happened, we had gathered lots of little clues,” says Khattab.
Some other clues materialised in September 2014 after a suspect named Amir Abbas managed to escape during an encounter with the police but his wife was injured and arrested. “We found plenty of incriminating material at his house and worked on it quietly from September [2014] to April [2015], matching and cross matching the evidence,” says Khattab.
This finally led to the arrest of Minhas and his associates, including Aziz. “When we recovered their laptops, their browsing history helped us connect them to other cases. “Had we been even one day late, all these boys would have left Karachi for Quetta, Waziristan etc.”
The CID officers also show what they call a hit list. These are A-4 size prints, carrying no information about their senders and receivers, but complete with photos and addresses of the targets, which include naval officers, intelligence agency personnel, police officers, showbiz personalities, journalists, workers of non-government organisations and three fashion designers. In some cases, the prints also carry details of the targets’ daily routine. When asked why the group wanted to target fashion designers, Aziz is quoted by Khattab to have said, “You kill three. No one will design sleeveless clothes again.”
At a distance from the police’s neatly tied narration, events take a rather mysterious turn. A former academic at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) who once taught Aziz, and who has since moved to Europe, recalls his student as “being extremely close to [an intelligence agency]”. In April 2014, this academic needed a police clearance report for some work. Having tried unsuccessfully for a week to obtain it, he asked Aziz for help. “He told me it was no problem, and that he could get it for me in 10 minutes. He was wrong; it took him an hour.” This alleged link, however, could not be verified through any other source.
Aziz’s purported reasons for having targeted Mahmud are also rather mystifying. Many Pakistanis, weary of having their lives held to ransom by rampant militancy, make anti-Taliban statements the way she made at the talk on the Karachi situation. And on February 14 this year, Aziz’s restaurant had a promotional offer targeted at customers and their “loved ones” — complete with the image of two hearts placed right next to each other. Isn’t this just another way of saying pyaar ho jaane do? His account of planning her murder also mixes up a few details. He states that Tony was unable to spot Mahmud’s car outside T2F between the February 13 talk on Karachi and the April 24 discussion on Baloch missing persons. (Mahmud did leave Karachi on February 19 for an overseas trip and returned on March 5. She briefly went out of the country again from March 25 to April 5.) Between her arrival from abroad and her assassination, there were at least five events at T2F and she was also attending to her office work at T2F every day during this period. Can, then, her murder precisely on the day of Unsilencing Balochistan: Take Two be seen as purely a coincidence?
Whatever the motivation behind his actions – whether he is serving the ends of as-yet unknown masters or assuaging his own desire to ‘right’ society’s moral compass – his confession suggests that he is part of a cell carrying out orders issued by a central command structure. This is particularly evident in the Safoora Goth incident: an attack of that size and precision cannot be carried out by a motley group of like-minded individuals.
While Aziz has been singing in police custody, his confession may not stand the test of a trial in a court of law. Confessions before the police or a JIT, or any executive authority for that matter, have no legal standing. “[Only] a confession before a judicial magistrate has legal sanctity because a judge is an independent authority,” says Karachi-based lawyer Faisal Siddiqi. “A judge is not part of the investigation so he has no vested interest [in its outcome].”
Without independently verifiable evidence, it is virtually impossible to successfully prosecute any accused on the basis of their confessions alone. Ajmal Pahari, an alleged target killer, for instance, was acquitted in 2011 notwithstanding his on-camera confession of having committed over 100 murders. (He was soon re-arrested on additional murder charges, however, and is currently behind bars.) Aziz shows little concern about his trial and punishment when asked about his future. “What are my plans now?” he says completely unfazed, and laughing slowly. “We’ll go to prison, but we’ll break out of there. Then, we’ll make plans.”
A prominent Pakistani journalist and human rights activist, Khurram Zaki, has been shot dead in Karachi.
Mr Zaki was dining in a restaurant in the city’s north when suspects opened fire from motorbikes, reports say.
He was an editor of the website Let us Build Pakistan, which condemns sectarianism and is seen as promoting democratic and progressive values.
The spokesman for a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban has said they were behind the shooting.
He said they killed him because of his recent campaign against a cleric of the Red Mosque in Islamabad.
Mr Zaki and other campaigners had filed a court case charging Abdul Aziz with incitement to hatred and violence against the Shia minority.
The case was brought in response to the cleric’s refusal to condemn attacks such as that on a school in Peshawar in 2014 in which 152 people, most of them schoolchildren, were killed.
Islamabad’s Red Mosque
Founded by Abdul Aziz’s father in 1965
Centre for hardline Islam in Pakistan since the 1990s
Attracts students from North-West Frontier Province and tribal areas where militant groups are strong
More than 100 killed as mosque raided by police in 2007 to dislodge heavily-armed militants sheltering there
Library named in honour of Osama Bin Laden
Video by female madrassah students in praise of so-called Islamic State
The school that says Bin Laden was a hero
Two other people were badly wounded in the Karachi attack, on Saturday night – a friend who Mr Zaki was dining with and a bystander.
Staff at the website paid tribute to their murdered colleague, and vowed to continue to stand up to militant groups.
Their statement said his contribution as a citizen journalist in supporting the rights of minority groups was “much bigger than [that of] all journalists combined in Pakistan”.
“His death is the grim reminder that whoever raises voice against Taliban [and other militant groups] in Pakistan will not be spared. And when they have to murder, they never fail.”
Ghulam Rasool & gang (Credit: pakistankakhudahafiz.com)Ghulam Rasool alias Chotoo, the ringleader of the Chotoo gang, against whom security forces have launched a major operation, worked as a security guard for MPA Atif Mazari for three to five years in Rojhan, according to police officials.
He also worked for the Punjab police as an informer till 2007 and used to inform police about gangs involved in robberies and kidnapping for ransom in Rajanpur and Muzaffargarh districts.
According to locals and police, Chotoo belongs to Bakrani clan of Mazari tribe of Rojhan area. He later developed differences with police over unknown reasons and established his own gang to carry out criminal activities.
Some small and prominent gangs operating in Rojhan, Dera Ghazi Khan and adjoining districts of Sindh and Balochistan also joined the Chotoo gang. They include Bilal alias Bilali Jaakha, Baba Long, Gumani Gopang, Sindhi group, Bosans of Muzaffargrah and Khalid Kajlani.
The Bilali Jaakha gang was formed by two brothers — Bilal Jaakha and Jugnu Jaakha. They are said to be implicated in a fake case for killing two sisters of Gopang tribe of Rajanpur. It is said the women were killed by their tribe but it implicated the Jaakha brothers in the case because of an old enmity.
The two brothers were reportedly acquitted of the murder charge by a court. During their time in jail they developed links with criminals and after their release killed their ‘enemies’ and joined the Chotoo gang.
The criminals who were declared proclaimed offenders in different areas of south Punjab and Sindh used to take shelter in localities under the control of Chotoo.
The small gangs, after kidnapping businessmen and professionals from areas as far as Karachi, Balochistan and Rahimyar Khan, sell them to Chotoo for Rs400,000 to Rs500,000. A former fugitive who had spent more than a year with the Chotoo gang said Chotoo got bigger ransom amount for their release.
The Punjab police have so far carried out six to seven operations against the Chotoo gang and lost at least 30 policemen. Some gangsters were also killed.
The riverine area of Kachi Jamal in Rajanpur, a stronghold of the Chotoo gang, has a population of more than 10,000 people living in small villages. They depend mostly on rearing animals and farming. Chotoo is known for helping the locals and never carried out any criminal activity in the area. But he made it a no-go area for police who found it almost impossible to get information about him from the locals.
Earlier, the Bosan gang headed by Zafar Bosan and Tariq Bosan were the uncrowned rulers of the area till 2003-04. They were later eliminated by police.
The biggest operation carried out by Rajanpur and Rahimyar Khan police against the Chotoo gang was in 2010 which continued for three months, but to no avail. The last operation was conducted in 2013.
During an operation in Kotla Mughlan area of Rajanpur some years ago, police, however, succeeded in recovering a doctor from the gang and killing a gangster.
CURRENT OPERATION: Local police wanted to carry out the operation against the Chotoo gang in a careful manner, cordoning off the area by setting up checkposts and bunkers nearby, slowly closing in on the outlaws.
But Punjab IG Mushtaq Sukhera was in a hurry.
According to a police officer who was onboard a boat which came under attack by the Chotoo gang on April 13, the local police opposed the way the IG wanted to carry out the operation.
They told him that the gang had more sophisticated weapons and capacity than police and only the army could counter them. But the IG said the Punjab government didn’t want to involve the army in the matter as it was against its policy.
The officer said that when the police refused to attack the gang without any proper planning and sought some time, the IG dared them, saying he would himself go to the riverine area if they didn’t.
At this, regional and district police officers begged their subordinates to save their prestige.
“Policemen in two boats moved into the area along both banks of the river. The boats came under attack. One of them was captured by the gangsters and the other in which I was got fired on,” the officer said, adding that police returned fire and killed two gangsters.
Four policemen were killed during the gunbattle, while another succumbed to his injuries in a hospital.
Surprisingly, the ground operation was being led by SHOs, though all senior officials, including DSPs, SPs, DPOs, RPOs and the IG, were present there.
When Chotoo came to know that an SHO was among the captured policemen, he separated him from other captives and shot him dead on the spot.
Due to haste and flawed planning of the IG, seven policemen have lost their lives while 27 others are still in captivity of the gangsters.
ISLAMABAD, March 30: Four days into their protest outside at D-Chowk, supporters of the former Punjab governor’s assassin have agreed to call off their sit-in and disperse following a ‘successful’ round of negotiations with the government, Express News reported on Wednesday.
According to sources, the government has agreed to some of the demands of pro-Mumtaz Qadri supporters, which include the release of non-violent protesters, no amendment in blasphemy laws, and withdrawal of cases against ulema to be considered, among others.
However, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar denied any written agreement with the demonstrators.
“No written agreement or otherwise was reached between the protesters’ leaders and the government, neither anyone from the government was mandated to do so,” he said while speaking at a news conference after successful negotiations with the representatives of some religious parties.
Several thousand protesters had marched in Islamabad Sunday, clashing with security forces before setting up camp outside key government buildings along the capital’s main Constitution Avenue.
No one will be allowed to hold protest at D-Chowk: Nisar
The interior minister said the government will not allow any person or party to hold political rallies or protests in the Red Zone area of Islamabad.
“I as an interior minister have decided it will be prohibited from now on to hold rally or political conferences at the D-Chowk area,” he said.
Talking about the protests, the country’s top security czar said a few violent people had used the situation to politicise the matter. “Some scholars had decided to mark the 40th day of Qadri’s execution peacefully, but miscreants took an advantage of the situation and started marching towards Red Zone.”
He went on to say, “Time has come that we decided people or party who threaten the state by occupying this area will not be allowed to do so.”
Commenting on those who have been arrested during the four-day protests, Nisar said whoever broke the law will be prosecuted accordingly.
“Every single person who broke the law, many of whom have been arrested, will be prosecuted. However, the bystanders or people who were not involved in breaking of law will be released soon,” he said.
Earlier during the day, protesters said they would not end their days-long sit-in and were “willing to die”, as armed security forces readied to clear the camp.
A police source said more than 7,000 security forces were poised to clear the sit-in, including the paramilitary Rangers and Frontier Corps with reinforcements from the Punjab Police.
Army troops had been standing guard at government buildings near the protest camp.
Qadri’s hanging, hailed as a “key moment” by analysts in country’s war on religious extremism, has become a flashpoint for the deep divisions in the conservative Muslim country.
His funeral earlier this month drew tens of thousands in an extremist show of force that alarmed moderate Muslims in the country, while the call to hang Bibi along with the Easter attack in Lahore has underscored a growing sense of insecurity for Pakistan’s minorities.
“It’s a sense of great grief, sorrow and fear,” Shamoon Gill, spokesperson for the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, told AFP.
The Lahore blast had left Christians feeling that “no place is safe”, he said, while the “mob situation” in Islamabad was “dangerous”.
“They are a serious threat to Asia Bibi’s life… there is a chance the government could bow down to pressure on this issue,” he warned.
Islamabad, March 28 – Pakistani authorities are searching for fighters from a Taliban militant faction that claimed responsibility for the Easter suicide bombing of a public park in Lahore that killed at least 72 people, many of whom were thought to be children.
The first funerals for those killed were taking place on Monday as the country began a three-day mourning period.
Pakistan’s worst-ever attack on beleaguered Christians prompts warning by bishop for future of minority in Muslim countries.
The bomber blew himself up near an entrance to Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, close to a children’s play area, on Sunday evening. The sound of the explosion was heard several kilometres away and eyewitnesses said there were big crowds in the area because of the Easter holiday.
“We must bring the killers of our innocent brothers, sisters and children to justice and will never allow these savage inhumans to over-run our life and liberty,” military spokesman Asim Bajwa said in a post on Twitter.
A faction of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, claimed responsibility for the explosion, saying it was targeted at Christians celebrating Easter. A spokesman for the group, Ehsanullah Ehsan, told the Guardian: “We have carried out this attack to target the Christians who were celebrating Easter. Also this is a message to the Pakistani prime minister that we have arrived in Punjab [the ruling party’s home province].” However the Punjab government denied the claim that the bombing was aimed exclusively at Christians, as those in the park were from all backgrounds.
“I saw body parts everywhere, especially those of young children. It was quite haunting, as many of the children’s rides were still operating, while there were dead bodies lying all around them,” said Mohammad Ali, a student who lives nearby and went to the park after hearing the blast.
Kiran Tanveer, another local resident, said: “There was a deafening noise. I immediately thought it must be a blast. I went outside to see. I saw injured people being taken and everyone running in all directions. It was a complete chaos.”
Shortly after the explosion, the area was cordoned off by law-enforcement agencies as the army and ambulances also reached the scene.
Local police said they had found one leg and the head of the suicide bomber. A police spokesman said: “He was around 23 to 25 years old. Initial reports suggest at least 20kg of explosives were used and the suicide jacket contained nuts and bolts,” a police official told local media.
An emergency was declared in the city’s hospitals and an appeal for blood donations made. Many family members were still looking for their loved ones late into the night.
Senior police official Haider Ashraf put the toll at 72 on Monday, saying at least eight children were among the dead, though other sources estimated that the proportion of children among the dead was much higher. Many of those injured were said to be in a critical condition.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, cancelled a planned trip to the UK on Monday, where he was scheduled to stop over before heading for the US. A three-day mourning period was announced in Punjab province.
The chief of Pakistan’s army, General Raheel Sharif, who is also in charge of the country’s security policy, chaired a high-level meeting late on Sunday night, which was attended by the heads of the military and intelligence services.
Many Christians have accused the government of not doing enough to protect them, saying politicians are quick to offer condolences after an attack but slow to take any real steps to improve security.
The US National Security Council spokesman, Ned Price, said: “The United States condemns in the strongest terms today’s appalling terrorist attack in Lahore, Pakistan. This cowardly act in what has long been a scenic and placid park has killed dozens of innocent civilians and left scores injured.”
While Lahore was reeling from the attack, Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, witnessed riots erupting outside the parliament house. Supporters of Mumtaz Qadri, who was hanged last month for the murder of Punjab’s governor Salman Taseer in 2011, are staging a sit-in outside the parliament and have given the Pakistani government a list of demands, the foremost of which is the immediate execution of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman who is on death row charged with blasphemy.
Qadri, Taseer’s bodyguard, shot him over the governor’s call to reform the blasphemy law and his support for Aasia Bibi.
Safdar Dawar contributed reporting on this from Peshawar
BRUSSELS, March 23 — The Brussels suicide bombers included two Belgium-born brothers with a violent criminal past and suspected links to plotters of the Islamic State’s Paris attacks last November, the authorities said on Wednesday, raising new alarms about Europe’s leaky defenses against a militant organization that has terrorized two European capitals with seeming impunity.
One of the brothers was deported by Turkey back to Europe less than a year ago, Turkey’s president said, suspected of being a terrorist fighter intent on entering Syria, where the Islamic State is based. Despite that statement, Belgian officials said neither brother had been under suspicion for terrorism until recently, an indication of the Islamic State’s ability to remain steps ahead of European intelligence and security monitors.
At least 31 people as well as the suicide bombers died on Tuesday in the blasts — two at the Brussels international airport departure terminal from homemade bombs hidden in luggage, and one at a subway station about seven miles away in the heart of Brussels. The number of wounded climbed to 300 from 270 on Wednesday as the area slowly sought to recover from one of the deadliest peacetime assaults in Belgium’s history.
“The European values of democracy and of freedom are what was savagely assaulted by these tragic attacks,” Prime Minister Charles Michel said after meeting with his French counterpart, Manuel Valls, who said, “Our two peoples are united in this hardship.”
Many Belgians attended memorials and others stayed home from work. Subway service was reduced and the airport, now a crime scene, was to remain closed at least through Thursday. And new evidence emerged of how the magnitude of the attacks could have been far worse.
The authorities recovered two undetonated bombs at the airport that had been constructed with 20 to 40 pounds of a volatile compound known as TATP — an explosive also used in the Paris attacks — combined with ammonium nitrate and metal bolts and nails, according to an American official who had reviewed intelligence shared by Belgium. The official said they also recovered what the Belgians called a suicide belt at the site, and found two more bombs concealed in suitcases, similar to those recovered at the airport, at the residence where the bombers hailed a taxi before Tuesday morning’s attacks.
As of Wednesday evening, the police were still hunting for at least one other member of the Brussels bombing ring, a man in a white coat and dark hat seen pushing a luggage cart in an airport surveillance photo, who was believed to have escaped before the explosions. They were also trying to determine if the other suicide bomber at the airport was Najim Laachraoui, 24, a Belgian believed to be a bomb maker, who has been linked to the Paris attacks.
There were indications that the Brussels bombers may have acted out of urgency because they feared discovery after the arrest on Friday in Belgium of the only remaining survivor among the Paris attackers, Salah Abdeslam, who is said to be cooperating with the authorities.
The Belgian prosecutor said the authorities found a recently composed will — which was possibly a suicide note — of the elder brother involved in the Brussels bombing, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 29, on a discarded computer in a garbage can. The will expressed his fear of being caught and ending up in a prison cell.
Mr. Bakraoui and the unidentified bomber blew themselves up at the Brussels airport at 7:58 a.m. Tuesday, in two explosions nine seconds apart. At 9:11 a.m., his younger brother, Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27, carried out the suicide attack at the Maelbeek subway station.
While the Belgian authorities have been credited with acting quickly in the aftermath of the assaults, there were growing questions about whether they had also suffered an enormous intelligence lapse.
The most prominent question arose from assertions by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that his government had detained Ibrahim el-Bakraoui near the Syrian border on June 14, alerted the Belgian government that he “was a foreign terrorist fighter,” and then deported him to the Netherlands.
“Despite our warnings that this person was a foreign terrorist fighter, the Belgian authorities could not identify a link to terrorism,” Mr. Erdogan said at a news conference in Ankara.
Justice Minister Koen Geens of Belgium acknowledged that Mr. Bakraoui had been deported to Europe last year, but he told the VRT broadcasting service that he was not known to the Belgian authorities for terrorism but was a common criminal who had been given conditional release from prison.
In his own news conference, Frédéric Van Leeuw, the Belgian federal prosecutor, described the trail that led investigators to identify the brothers.
After the attacks, a taxi driver who suspected that he may have driven the bombers to the airport approached the police and led them to a house on Rue Max Roos, in the Schaerbeek neighborhood of Brussels, where he said he had picked up three men, according to Mr. Van Leeuw. There, the prosecutor said, the authorities found about 33 pounds of TATP, considered a large amount.
At the apartment in Schaerbeek, investigators also found nearly 40 gallons of acetone and nearly eight gallons of hydrogen peroxide. Acetone, a solvent in nail polish remover, and hydrogen peroxide, found in hair bleach, are among the ingredients used to make TATP. The investigators also found detonators, a suitcase full of nails and screws, and other materials that could be used to make explosive devices.
On Wednesday, the Belgian police raided a building in the Anderlecht neighborhood of Brussels. Officers in protective clothing carted out files and plastic boxes as masked officers stood guard outside. Two police officers in the neighborhood said an arrest had been made, but the identity of that person was not clear.
Several Belgian news outlets reported last week that the Bakraoui brothers, who grew up in the working-class Laeken neighborhood, were wanted for questioning in connection with a March 15 raid on an apartment in the Brussels suburb of Forest, which had been linked to the Paris attacks. It was not clear why the authorities did not formally ask the public to help find them.
Ibrahim el-Bakraoui was sentenced in 2010 to nine years in prison for shooting at police officers after a robbery attempt at a currency exchange office. It was not clear when or why he was released, or how he ended up in Turkey.
In 2011, Khalid el-Bakraoui was sentenced to five years in prison for attempted carjacking; when arrested, he was in possession of assault rifles. Interpol issued a warrant for him in August after he violated his parole. He is believed to have used a false name to rent a safe house in Charleroi, Belgium, and the apartment in Forest. Fingerprints belonging to two of the Paris attackers, Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Bilal Hadfi, were found in the Charleroi house on Dec. 9, and Mr. Abdeslam’s prints were found in the Forest apartment.
Speaking on Belgian radio on Wednesday morning, Interior Minister Jan Jambon said that the police raids would continue, and that the threat status would remain at its highest, Level, 4. “There are many hypotheses to put on the table,” he said. “It’s up to investigators to sort out fact from fiction.”
Speaking later to RTL radio, Mr. Jambon said it was also unlikely that the attacks could have been avoided even if Belgium had been at the highest threat level instead of Level 3, which was imposed after the Paris attacks.
He said Belgium had “everything possible in place to avoid a catastrophe like what happened yesterday, like other countries.”
Areas like the Brussels airport departure hall are particularly vulnerable because, as at most Western airports, bags are not searched until after check-in. That allows a would-be attacker to pack a bomb into a suitcase that could have far more space than an explosive vest and therefore be far more lethal.
In terrorism-plagued countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, and across the Middle East, bags are put through scanners when travelers enter the airport.
BRUSSELS, March 20—The capture of accused Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam yielded crucial insight into how he used local connections to hide in the Belgian capital for months and led to his admission he was preparing to strike again, officials said.
Friday’s arrest of Mr. Abdeslam several hundred yards from his family home has left authorities trying to determine the extent to which Europe’s most wanted man relied on friends and family to stay undetected since the Nov. 13 attacks. They said the investigation into the Paris attacks so far suggests that fighters trained in Syria could tap such a network of local sympathizers to prepare new strikes.
“We have found a lot of weapons, heavy weapons, in the first investigations and we have found a new network around him in Brussels,” Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said Sunday. He added that the French-Belgian investigation had discovered more than 30 people involved in the Paris attacks.
“But we are sure there are others,” he said.
European authorities say they are searching for at least one Syrian-trained fighter who worked with Mr. Abdeslam. And Belgian officials said the network is much larger than they previously suspected. In Brussels on Sunday, a heavy police and army presence guarded train stations and the city’s main tourist areas.
The combination of experienced jihadists with no prior connection to Belgium and individuals with local knowledge is a key focus of
investigators anxious to prevent further attacks and break open the Islamic State terror network.
Mr. Abdeslam was assisted before and after the Paris attacks by a group of at least three trained fighters with ties to Islamic State, officials said. One of the men is dead, and a second has been captured. A third—known by the alias Soufiane Kayal—remains at large, Belgian authorities said.
According to Paris prosecutors, Mr. Abdeslam told Belgian investigators that he had intended to blow himself up on Nov. 13 with other suicide bombers at the Stade de France soccer stadium. But he said he changed his plans at the last moment. Mr. Abdeslam’s lawyer said Sunday that his client was cooperating with authorities, though he planned legal action against the French prosecutor for allegedly revealing details of confidential Belgian court proceedings. Mr.
Reynders, the foreign minister, said Mr. Abdeslam told prosecutors he had been ready to carry out follow-up attacks.
Another radical fighter—an Algerian man whom police identified as Mohamed Belkaid—was shot dead last Tuesday while holding police at bay by firing a Kalashnikov from an apartment window. Mr. Abdeslam and a man believed to be a Syrian-trained fighter using the alias Amine Choukry had been hiding inside and were able to escape, authorities say.
“People are coming over from Syria constantly,” said Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens on television on Sunday. “They are unknown to us; often they haven’t been to Europe before. That’s a challenge we face: the cooperation between local networks that are very integrated and people who are trained and come from the Middle East.”
Belgian investigators said they were struck at the fanaticism and violence they encountered in the Tuesday raid. When Mr. Belkaid opened fire with an assault rifle, he “knew he was not going to come out alive,” said one Belgian official. “This shows the level of training and determination these people have,” the official said.
Belgian officials say two months before the November Paris attacks, Mr. Abdeslam linked up with the fighters from Syria. Mr. Abdeslam picked up both Mr. Kayal and Mr. Belkaid in Budapest, where they had taken cover in the wave of Syrians fleeing war, officials said. A U.S. official said Islamic State has been hiding fighters without European passports in the flow of migrants. “They are taking advantage of the migrant crisis,” said the official.
Investigators haven’t determined precisely where Mr. Abdeslam met the other fighter, Mr. Choukry, and brought him to Brussels, but it was also allegedly ahead of the Paris attacks. The two men were stopped and fingerprinted in Germany on Oct. 3.
But it was a network of childhood friends, family members and fellow petty criminals that apparently helped Mr. Abdeslam and the Syrian-trained fighters stay under cover immediately before and after the Paris attacks, authorities said. Without their assistance, they said, he couldn’t have remained at large for four months.
A French national, the 26-year-old Mr. Abdeslam grew up in Molenbeek, a poor but gentrifying neighborhood of Brussels with a large Muslim population. Molenbeek appears to be one of the places where the Paris attackers organized the November terror assault and has long been the focus of counterterror investigations by Belgian authorities.
On the night of the Nov. 13 attacks, Mr. Abdeslam is suspected of escaping from Paris with the help of childhood friends from Molenbeek—Hamza Attou and Mohammed Amri—who drove him back to Brussels. The pair admit driving him back but say they had nothing to do with the attacks and didn’t know of his involvement.
Another Brussels friend, Ali Oulkadi, admitted to having driven Mr. Abdeslam on the day after the attacks to another Brussels district, where police later found one of Mr. Abdeslam’s hide-outs, according to his lawyer. Mr. Oulkadi said he hadn’t previously known of Mr. Abdeslam’s involvement.
Officials say Mr. Abdeslam didn’t go into hiding in Molenbeek for the entire four months. Instead, he moved around Brussels, squatting in houses that weren’t in use or abandoned—such as the apartment in
houses that weren’t in use or abandoned—such as the apartment in the Brussels neighborhood where a the gunbattle broke out on Tuesday, just a few days before his capture.
Another apartment where Mr. Abdeslam is believed to have returned to after the Nov. 13 attacks is in the neighborhood of Schaerbeek, where police said they found evidence that the suicide vests used in Paris had been assembled.
Under the Radar
From the time suspect Salah Abdeslam fled Paris after the Nov. 13 attacks, Belgian authorities believe he was hiding out in several Brussels neighborhoods. He was arrested in his home district, some 500 yards from his grandmother’s house.
Molenbeek district counselor Ahmed El Khannouss, who knew Salah Abdeslam and his family, said the fugitive couldn’t have hidden for so long if he had relied only on his childhood friends and family members.
“It’s not correct to say he was in Molenbeek all the time. He was taken to places that are cut off from society—the flat in (the Brussels district) Forest had no electricity or water. Only in the end, he spent three to four days in the basement of his cousin,” Mr. El Khannouss said.
The gunbattle on Tuesday provided investigators with the hard evidence they needed that Mr. Abdeslam was still in Brussels. The funeral this past Thursday of Mr. Abdeslam’s brother, one of the suicide attackers in Paris, also provided the investigative break that they needed to catch him.
One of the men at the funeral, Abid Aberkan, is a distant cousin of Mr. Abdeslam. According to investigators, Mr. Aberkan had offered his mother’s house to shelter Mr. Abdeslam in Molenbeek after the gunbattle. According to local officials, police began monitoring many of the people attending the funeral.
From the surveillance they learned of a mobile number possibly being used by Mr. Abdeslam. That number led police to the Molenbeek apartment where Mr. Abdeslam was hiding, the officials said.
Mr. Aberkan remains in custody after being charged with participation in the activities of a terrorist organization and for hiding criminals. Nathalie Gallant, who represents both the families of Mr. Abdeslam and of Mr. Aberkan, told Belgian television that the two families were linked but said Mr. Aberkan had nothing to do with the attacks.
—Natalia Drozdiak and Matthias Verbergt contributed to this article.
Corrections & Amplifications:
Nathalie Gallant represents the families of Salah Abdeslam and Abid Aberkan, a distant cousin of Mr. Abdeslam. An earlier version of this article misspelled Ms. Gallant’s last name. (March 20, 2016)
CHARSADDA/ISLAMABAD – Stuck with 15 of his students on a third floor balcony of a campus building as gunmen came up the stairs, university director Mohammad Shakil urged Pakistani police arriving at the scene to toss him up a gun so he could shoot back.
“We were hiding … but were unarmed,” Shakil told Reuters, speaking after four Islamist militants attacked Bacha Khan University in Pakistan’s troubled northwest on Wednesday, killing more than 20 people.
“I was worried about the students, and then one of the militants came after us,” Shakil added. “After repeated requests, the police threw me a pistol and I fired some shots at the terrorists.”
As more details of Wednesday’s assault emerged, attention focused on at least two members of staff who took up arms to resist attackers bent on killing them and their students.
Some hailed them as heroes, as the country digested an attack which bore similarities to the massacre, in late 2014, of 134 pupils at an army-run school in Peshawar, about 30 km (19 miles) from where this week’s violence occurred.
Others questioned whether teachers should be armed, as many are, because it goes against the ideals of the profession.
Such a dilemma may have been far from the mind of chemistry professor Hamid Hussain, as he locked himself inside a room with colleagues after gunmen stormed an accommodation block on the university campus.
When the assailants broke down the door, Hussain fired several rounds from his pistol, according to Shabir Ahmad Khan, an English department lecturer taking cover in an adjacent washroom.
“They carried on heavy shooting and I was preparing myself for death, but then they did not enter the washroom and left,” Khan recalled.
Later on in the same building, Hussain fired again at the militants to allow some of his students to get away, surviving pupils told local media. Hussain was subsequently shot and later died from his wounds.
“Kudos to professor Dr Hamid Hussain. Our hero fought bravely n saved many,” Asma Shirazi, a popular talk show host, said on Twitter.
TEACHERS’ DILEMMA
Others, too, have credited the actions of Hussain and Shakil with helping to prevent the gunmen, armed with assault rifles and hand grenades, from spilling more blood.
Bacha Khan University also employed around 50 of its own guards who, witnesses said, fought for close to an hour to keep the gunmen isolated and prevent them from entering the girl’s hostel as the police and army arrived.
Pakistan army spokesman General Asim Bajwa said the security guards responded “very well” to the attack before reinforcements reached them.
In the wake of the 2014 school massacre, teachers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where Peshawar is located, were offered weapons training. Yet some are wary of arming teachers and encouraging them to engage in battle.
Gun ownership is common in Pakistan, owing to liberal licensing laws, and particularly so in the semi-autonomous tribal belt near the Afghan border where the threat of militant violence is high.
Jamil Chitrali, president of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa University Teaching Staff Association, said more teachers were now carrying personal weapons, as security had worsened.
“Arms are against the norms of my profession,” he said. “I am teaching principles and morality in the class. How I can carry a gun?”
WHO IS TO BLAME?
Four gunmen, all since killed, were involved in Wednesday’s attack, officials said. They used the cover of thick fog to scale the campus’ rear walls, before storming student dormitories and classrooms and executing people at will.
Some 3,000 students were enrolled at the university, many living on campus, while hundreds of visitors had arrived to hear a poetry recital to commemorate the life of local Pashtun nationalist hero and pacifist Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, after whom the university is named.
The provincial government declared a day of mourning on Thursday as grieving families buried their dead and survivors recalled their ordeal.
Who was to blame remains a mystery. A senior commander of the Pakistan Taliban, Umar Mansoor, on Wednesday claimed responsibility, but an official spokesman for the group later denied involvement, calling the attack “un-Islamic”.
The hardline Islamist movement was believed to be behind the school massacre just over a year ago, and educational institutions are an increasingly common target for militants wanting to frighten the public.
Pakistan has killed and arrested hundreds of suspected Taliban militants in the last year under a major crackdown against a group fighting to overthrow the government and install a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
The army said on Thursday the attack in Charsadda, near Peshawar, was coordinated from across the border inside Afghanistan, according to its investigations.
Army chief General Raheel Sharif has called Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and the U.S. commander of international forces in Afghanistan to ask their help in locating those it holds responsible for the assault, army spokesman Bajwa said on Twitter.
The band of stranglers engaged in ‘thuggee’ in India during the 18th and 19th centuries is estimated to have killed between 50,000 and 100,000 people. In a strikingly similar occupational pursuit, the band of assailants engaged in ‘mugging’ on the streets of Karachi appears to have done far better.
Zubair Habib, the newly appointed chief of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), confirmed that in 2015 alone, 37,390 incidents of mugging at gunpoint were reported in Karachi. What he did not reveal was the fact that only one out of five victims ever bothers to lodge an FIR.
Today, ‘mugging’ is a far more sophisticated and efficient version of its forerunner – ‘thuggee’. While ‘thugs’ looped a ‘rumaal’ or an handkerchief around a victim’s neck, ‘muggers’ use sophisticated weapons. The use of weapons expedites the decision-making process and the deal is clinched within a matter of seconds.
The arrival of the British and their rigorous methods to fight crime meant that ‘thugs’ had met their match. A ‘Thuggee and Dacoity’ Department was established in 1835 and William Henry Sleeman was appointed as its first superintendent. Using simple techniques and plenty of common sense, Sleeman began to meticulously map each attack site and profile ‘thuggee’ gangs and their techniques. His specially trained police officers, disguised as merchants and travellers would infiltrate gangs and take preemptive actions to capture gangsters. The captured ‘thugs’ were given the incentive to save themselves if they informed on their accomplices. Special trial courts were set up and more than 3,700 ‘thugs’ were either hanged or ‘transported for life’. In a short span of about 10 years, Sleeman succeeded in eradicating what had plagued the Subcontinent for over two hundred years.
The Sindh police had only to follow the recipe of William Sleeman to eradicate the modern version of ‘thuggee’ in Karachi. The process can be started by identifying 10-20 intersections notorious for mugging incidents, installing cameras to cover these locations, stationing four armed policemen (in plain clothes) at each of these intersections in a manner that they have a full view of the location and by closely monitoring each intersection from a central control room. The police on duty can be alerted as soon as a mugging incident is observed (if the event has not already been detected). The police can use stun (or real) guns to disable and arrest culprits. The camera evidence should be enough to prosecute them. The element of surprise is a key factor in combating this crime. Finally, close-circuited cameras are discreetly relocated at different potential mugging sites so that muggers are never sure of when and what location is being actively monitored. It is most likely that the police would reject these simple methods and instead opt for more complex, cost-intensive and externally-funded options.
Why is the police hesitating to handle a localised version of the task that Sleeman could accomplish 200 years ago? Why has a dedicated ‘Mugging and Dacoity’ Department not been set up thus far? Why is a major part of the Sindh police employed to protect some 1,000 VIPs in the province, leaving people at the mercy of muggers and target-killers?
Along with the specially designed ‘mugger traps’, a number of other steps ought to be taken in parallel. A nationwide hotline for reporting the loss of cell phones should be advertised and implemented. Cancellation of SIM and IMEI should be made obligatory on mobile companies and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) as soon as information is received about a phone theft/snatching. Phones with missing or fudged IMEIs should not be allowed to operate and the PTA should assume the overall responsibility to ensure compliance. A national database of cancelled IMEIs should be maintained on the PTA’s website. The sale and purchase of phones (new and second-hand) must be traceable to equipment IMEI and the CNIC of the customer. If in the 19thcentury, William Sleeman could single-handedly eliminate ‘thuggee’ throughout India, how can a 21st century nuclear state not stop mugging in Karachi?
The writer is a management systems consultant and a freelance writer on social issues
