Pakistani police said today they had detained at least 18 members of a banned sectarian militant group suspected of involvement in a bloody attack on police recruits. Gunmen on motorcycles killed 11 police recruits and wounded nine on Sunday in the southwestern city of Quetta when they raked their vehicle with gunfire.
All the dead were ethnic Hazaras, belonging to the minority Shi'ite strand of Islam.
The deputy police chief in Baluchistan province said police had rounded up members of the outlawed radical Sunni Muslim group Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) in overnight raids in Quetta.
Pakistan outlawed several Islamic militant groups, including SSP, last year as part of a crackdown on Islamic extremists following the September 11th attacks on the United States and an assault on the Indian parliament in December 2001.
In separate raids over the weekend police arrested three key activists of another outlawed Sunni militant group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and discovered a 10-man hitlist of prominentShi'ites in Punjab province, intelligence officials told reporters.