Pakistani Police Arrest Nine al-Qaida Suspects

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, December 20, 2002

Pakistani Police Arrest Nine al-Qaida Suspects

Pakistani police arrested nine family members Thursday suspected of being al-Qaida operatives, including three naturalized Americans and two naturalized Canadians.

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Pakistani police arrested nine family members Thursday suspected of being al-Qaida operatives, including three naturalized Americans and two naturalized Canadians.

FBI agents searched the family's home for at least two hours and seized four computers and CDs. Relatives said the family's guards opened fire on police during the raid, the second in less than a week on suspected Islamic militants. No injuries were reported.

"We got information about these people, and today the police went there and made these arrests. We can say they are suspected al-Qaida," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Ahmed said some of the nine men arrested in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's eastern Punjab province, are suspected of having smuggled weapons for use in terrorist attacks.

Those arrested were Dr. Jaded Ahmad, his two sons, two brothers, three nephews and uncle. Ahmad and his two sons, Umar Karar and Khyzer Ali, are naturalized Americans and former Florida residents, said Rehman Beg, a relative.

Ahmad lived in the United States between 1972 and 1983. His sons also returned to Pakistan several years earlier.

Beg also said two of the other arrested men - Ahmad's brother, Naveed Khawaja and Khawaja's son, Usman, believed to be 18 - are Canadian nationals who returned to their native Pakistan. They had lived in Toronto, he said.

Ahmad is a close relative of Hafiz Suleman Butt, a legislator and member of Jamaat-e-Islami, the oldest and best-organized pro-Taliban Islamic party in Pakistan.

Family members said the FBI agents conducted the raid with police.

"Pakistani security agencies accompanied by foreigners arrested our family members like they were criminals," Marghoob Ahmad Mir, Ahmad's brother-in-law, told a new conference in Lahore.

He said Ahmad's two private security guards exchanged fire with forces raiding the house.

Ahmad's daughter-in-law, who identified herself only as Rubina, said she believed he was arrested because of his trips to Afghanistan as a doctor last year to treat Islamic fighters after U.S. bombardments.

His wife, Umtul Jilal, said her husband had no links with the Taliban or al-Qaida. She called the arrests "a shameful act."

Ahmad is the second Pakistani doctor to be arrested for alleged links to Taliban and al-Qaida fugitives. On Oct. 21, authorities arrested Dr. Amer Aziz, a British-trained orthopedic surgeon, and held him for a month.

After he was released, Aziz admitted in an interview with AP that he had treated Osama bin Laden and had seen the al-Qaida leader after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Thursday's arrests came just hours after a chemical storage warehouse used as a bomb-making factory exploded in the southern port city of Karachi, killing a man wanted in connection with the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the June bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Karachi.

Five days earlier, police in Karachi arrested three Pakistani men who they say planned to target American diplomats in a bomb plot. A truckload of ammonium nitrate - a fertilizer used to make explosives - was seized in that raid Sunday.

The arrests also follow two separate grenade attacks in the last three days against peacekeepers and U.S. troops in the Afghan capital of Kabul. Two U.S. soldiers, their interpreter and three civilians were wounded in those attacks.

American troops have been combing Afghanistan for any trace of Osama bin Laden and ousted Taliban leaders, many of whom are now reported to be in Pakistan.

Pakistan is a key ally of the U.S.-led coalition forces in the war against terrorism. Pakistani security agencies have so far have arrested more than 422 Taliban and al-Qaida men and handed them over to the American authorities.

Source: agencies

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