Possible business angle: Al Qaeda hand ruled out in Saudi diplomat’s murder

If it were al Qaeda, it would have been a bigger attack: investigators.

KARACHI:

Investigators looking into the daylight killing of a Saudi consulate official in Defence Phase VI on May 16 have ruled out the possibility of al Qaeda having a hand in the attack.

“[Al Qaeda] has the capability and ruthlessness to bomb the entire Saudi consulate building, but that didn’t happen,” said a counter terrorism official while talking to The Express Tribune. He added that had al Qaeda been involved, a ‘spectacular attack’ would have been carried out.

The diplomat, Hasan M. al Kahtani, was shot dead by men on two motorcycles near the Saudi consulate.

Neither was this a reaction to Osama bin Laden’s killing by American special forces on May 2, said another senior counter terrorism official. “We also found to be incorrect reports in the media that perhaps all this happened because OBL’s two Saudi wives in the custody of intelligence agencies were not being allowed to return to their country of origin,” he said. The revelations by the officials were being made on the basis of some suspects in their custody.

There is one more angle which is not being ignored. Hinting at possible business deals gone bad, a senior intelligence agency official said that the Saudi diplomat was known to have close contacts with local Hajj and Umra operators in the city, who sought his help in getting visas.

For his part, Crime Investigation Department SSP Fayyaz Khan said that he believed that the killing was connected to the recent events in Bahrain, where the majority Shia population rose up in protest against the ruling Sunni elite.

Officials who spoke with The Express Tribune say they have found some strong clues that hint in the direction of militants within the Ahle Tasheeh sect. They say that just as there are Tehreek-i-Taliban-linked mostly Sunni militants, there are extremists active in the other sect as well, who are operating in the city. The proscribed Sipah-e-Mohammad group, for example, was formed as a reaction to the attacks on the minority sect’s followers in Pakistan. Although, the Sipah-e-Mohammad is no longer anything like what it was back in the day, these extremists now operate under new names such as the ‘Mehdi force’.

They are believed to have formed small cells of three to four members each. Law-enforcement members also say that in the past some youth of a campus-based sectarian organisation were also found to be involved in terrorism. Some allegedly even confessed that they received militant training in a neighbouring country that was not Afghanistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 4^th, 2011.