Terror attack bid foiled in Pakistan

A "9.11" tragedy in Pakistani version has been averted, as security agencies arrested at least five terror suspects who were planning a major attack in the past week.

The Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) Sunday quoted Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, the country's information minister, as saying that the gang was planning to attack the main targets covering the President House, Prime Minister House, the Army Chief's House and the US Embassy in the capital.

A huge cache of arms and ammunition, including bombs, grenades, rockets, rocket launchers, detonators and around 50 other explosive devices have been seized, said the minister.

He added that two Egyptian nationals still at large were believed to be the masterminds.

Pakistani security personnel conducted the raids solely, the minister said, playing down the widely-believed assumption that intelligence agencies from the United States have long been involved in anti-terror campaigns in Pakistan.

He said the country's security agencies had penetrated into terror network and that they had achieved "notable successes" in the recent past, leading to a series of arrests.

In this particular case, the minister said, a number of vehicles which were to be used in the planned attacks have been traced by the intelligence personnel, setting up ground for the arrests.

It is not clear so far whether "the small new group" has links with al-Qaida, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said .

He added that the identity of those arrested has to be kept secret as more arrests were yet to be made.

Meanwhile, Faisal Saleh Hayat, the country's interior minister, was quoted as saying the two Egyptian henchmen did belong to the al-Qaida network.

He also revealed that several local Muslim clerics also played significant roles in this conspiracy and that law enforcement agencies are trying to pin them down.

"We hope to catch them soon," the interior minister noted.

Sharing with Afghanistan an over 2,500-km volatile border, Pakistan has long been in the terror shadow cast by the Taliban and al-Qaida fugitives sneaking from across the line.

The government's "pro-America" policy has made the nation, with above 90 percent of its population being Muslims, more prone to the religious fever, political strategists here observed.

Islamic zealots have a strong resentment toward the government's cooperation with the United States in the counter-terror campaign, citing it as a treason to the Muslim brotherhood.

Common people, in the meantime, are getting impatient by the ambiguity of the government's stand on whether to send troops to Iraq as the United States has long been lobbying for.

These backgrounds produced a special atmosphere in the country, which is widely witnessed as the major cause of the increased violence across the nation in the recent past.

Shaukat Aziz, the finance minister and the would-be prime minister as well, narrowly escaped from an assassination attempt in July, which put the nation on red alert against the terror threats.

Law enforcement agencies have since intensified the hunt for terrorists hiding in the country, leading to a handful arrests in the past month.

Military units this week also resumed the crackdown on foreign militants holing up in the country's mountainous western tribal region, bordering Afghanistan.