Police arrest 7 men suspected of links to attacks on minority sect in Pakistan

Pakistan: 7 arrested over links to sect attackers

LAHORE, Pakistan — Seven men have been arrested over alleged links to the militants who attacked a minority sect in eastern Pakistan, killing 93 people, police said Sunday.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik visited one of the two mosques attacked Friday in Lahore and promised to work with local officials to tackle the growing problem of militancy in Pakistan’s heartland of Punjab province.

“The terrorists, who have been hiding in southern Punjab, have now surfaced,” said Malik. “Our action will be stronger now because we cannot tolerate these killings.”

The government has been criticized for lacking the will to crack down on militants in Punjab, many of whom are part of now-banned militant groups that were started with government support in the 1980s and 1990s to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan and pressure archenemy India.

Many of these groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammad, have formed links with the Pakistani Taliban, which has recruited militants to carry out attacks in parts of Pakistan far from its sanctuary in the northwest near Afghanistan.

Police said the seven men arrested over the past two days in different parts of Punjab belonged to a variety of militant groups but refused to specify which ones. The arrests were fueled by information gleaned from one of the attackers who was captured Friday.

“We have good leads,” said senior Lahore police officer Chaudhry Shafiq. “We hope to round up all the handlers and backers of the attackers soon.”

Friday’s attacks targeted the Ahmadi sect, a minority reviled as heretics by mainstream Muslims.

Seven gunmen attacked two mosques in Lahore with assault rifles, grenades and suicide vests. At least two of the attackers were captured, while some died in the standoff or by detonating their explosives.

Pakistanis have criticized the government for failing to protect them from militant attacks.

A woman visiting one of the wounded from the mosque attacks Sunday refused to accept a bouquet of flowers from Malik, the interior minister, when he visited the hospital and lambasted him for inadequate government security, according to local TV footage.

Police said Saturday that the men who attacked the mosques in Lahore were part of the Pakistani Taliban and trained in the North Waziristan tribal region.

The revelation could help the U.S. persuade Pakistan that rooting out the various extremist groups in North Waziristan is in Islamabad’s own interest. Up to now, Pakistan has resisted, in part because it says its army is stretched thin in operations elsewhere, including in the Orakzai tribal area.

Fighter jets pounded militant hide-outs in Orakzai on Sunday, killing 18 suspected fighters, said Jahanzeb Khan, a local administrator. The attacks came after a roadside bomb struck a military vehicle Saturday night in the tribal area, killing two soldiers, he said.

The military launched the operation in Orakzai in mid-March to target militants who fled a major army offensive last year in nearby South Waziristan. Hundreds of suspected fighters have been killed by airstrikes and artillery since then, according to the military.

It is very difficult to independently confirm the number and identities of those killed because foreign journalists are banned from traveling to the tribal areas.

Elsewhere in Pakistan’s volatile northwest Sunday, militants opened fire on a passenger vehicle in the Kurram tribal area, killing two women and wounding four other people, said Nasim Shah, a local administrator.

The militants carried out the attack because they were frustrated by their inability to muster support in Tabertan village, where the shooting occurred, said Shah.

Associated Press writers Hussain Afzal in Parachinar and Asif Shahzad in Islamabad contributed to this report.