Badhaber camp assault: Afghan national arrested in Charsadda

Security official says arrested indivdual was living in a rented house

CHARSADDA: In a joint effort, police and law enforcement agencies arrested on Tuesday a suspected Afghan national from Charsadda district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa over his alleged involvement in Badhaber PAF airbase attack.

“A raid was conducted in the village of Pladherai near the entry point of the Charsadda district,” a security official who requested not to be named told The Express Tribune.

Read: Badhaber base attack: Dozens picked up as investigation opens

“The man from Afghanistan was living in a rented house,” said the official, claiming the security forces tracked him down in connection to the attack on Badhaber airbase. However, the official refused to give any further detail of the raid owing to the sensitivity of the matter.

According to sources, the tenants living in suburban localities were not registered and there was no mechanism for any available data on the identities of people living there.

On Sunday, five TTP-linked terrorists who were killed in the Badhaber base attack had been identified through their fingerprints. Ibrahim, Siraj, Rabnawaz, Adnan and Muhammad Ishaq were identified as five of the 14 terrorists who were killed following an attack on a PAF base in Peshwar early on Friday. “Three of them belonged to Khyber Agency while the other two were from Swat district,” a source had said.

On Saturday, only a day after a diabolical terror attack that left 43 people, including terrorists, dead at the former NSA surveillance site, dozens of suspects had been rounded up and a case was registered against unidentified suspects. The K-P Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) registered the FIR under terrorism charges on the complaint of the Badhaber camp commandant. “The FIR has been registered and the CTD will investigate the matter,” an official of the Badhaber police station had confirmed to The Express Tribune.

Read: Five terrorists killed in Badhaber base attack identified

Further, in a search operation launched by the Badhaber police around the airbase, 28 suspects, including some Afghan refugees, were taken into custody for interrogation. Police and security forces also launched joint search operations in the cantonment area and the PAF airbase in Kohat, arresting another 96 suspects with weapons, including repeaters, Kalashnikovs, shotguns and pistols.