12 suspects captured in Lahore

LAHORE: At least 12 injured people suspected of being linked with the last week’s assault on Jinnah Hospital have been arrested after a raid on a doctor’s house in the Quaid-i-Azam Town on Monday. The doctor, Mirza Safdar Baig, was also arrested. They are believed to be linked with two Afghan Taliban factions.

All of them had multiple gunshot wounds and were under treatment at the house located in the A-I block of the township for the past several days, officials of the Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) said. They had arrived in Lahore about 20 days ago via Quetta and Karachi.

According to CIA officials, the doctor, Mirza Safdar Baig, lives with his wife elsewhere in the city while his two sons are settled abroad. They said that the doctor himself did not socialise much with people living in the locality.  The doctor, who is said to own a private clinic in the same locality, was treating the suspects at his single-storey house, the CIA officials said.

The officials said that the suspected Afghans were said to be staying in a rented house, but they did not know its address yet. They said eight of the 12 suspects belonged to Taliban’s Azizullah group from the Khost area. Others are said to be affiliated with the Kamaluddin group of Lughman. The police also claimed to have recovered sophisticated weapons from the possession of the arrested suspects.

Lahore Capital City Police Officer Muhammad Aslam Tareen said: “It will be too premature to say anything for sure about their affiliations. Their interrogation has just begun.” He said that the media would be apprised about any new development.

CIA SP Muhammad Umer Virk agreed with the CCPO’s assessment and said that it seemed that they had been injured during some operation carried out by US forces in Afghanistan, adding that it remained to be seen how they had managed to get here.

A senior police officer of the Lahore police privy to the investigations said that all of the arrested suspects “belonged to Afghanistan and all of them had suspicious firearm injuries.”  He, however, did not give much credence to their claims about their affiliations, saying that they “were changing their statements too rapidly” and that they were not too “reliable.”

A police official close to the raiding team said that they had conducted the raid on information they had gotten during a snap check. He said they did not have any specific information prior to the raid. They said the accused were suspected of having ties with the Jinnah Hospital attackers.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 8^th, 2010.