Officials of law enforcement agencies said that in an early morning raid on a house in Sihala, three suspected terrorists were picked up. The information extracted from the three led to the arrest of two of their accomplices from a locality within the jurisdiction of Sihala in the outskirts of the city.
According to initial information provided by the suspects during primary interrogation, they were planning to target the police school and Sihala police station. Three of them had been impersonating as workers in a soap factory located near the police training school for the past few months, using the job as a cover for their reconnaissance activities.
Three of the five men had been tasked to collect details of security arrangements at the school and identify potential weak points. The other two were facilitators of suicide bombers, said official sources. The terrorist group was planning to launch a Lahore Manawan-style attack on Sihala Police Academy.
The academy is one of the biggest in Punjab, housing hundreds of under-training recruits of Punjab police.
A centre for imparting anti-terrorism training has also been set up at the school with the assistance from the United States. US experts are giving training to Pakistani law enforcement agencies officials.
The Sihala Police Station was also a potential target of the terrorists, the suspects revealed. Law enforcement agencies recovered maps of the police training facility in Sihala and many other important installations along with arms and ammunition from the possession of the suspects.
The suspects revealed that the attack on the facility was imminent since the reconnaissance mission had almost been completed. The security agencies feared that the information gathered by the suspects had already been passed on to their headquarters in Charbagh.
The suspects were arrested after security agencies started monitoring their activities on suspicions and traced their links to the terrorist group. Qari Mushtaq Group is a splinter group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan Swat and was one of the many groups which confronted Pakistan Army under the leadership of Mullah Fazlullah in Swat military operation in 2009. The members of the group survived the operation and were in hiding since then, said officials of security agencies.
On the information provided by the nabbed suspects, security agencies were conducting raids at different places and more arrests were expected, officials claimed.
A few days before Eid, Sihala Police had arrested three suspected terrorists who were trying to escape the city. They were also planning to target key government installations in the city, police had said.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 29th, 2010.
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