Two Pakistanis allegedly linked to the Taliban admitted today to being behind last month's car bomb attack on the US consulate in Karachi as well as a string of other attacks.
The pair, paraded by Pakistan paramilitary Rangers before a news conference in Karachi, said they had originally planned to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf in late April, but their car bomb had failed to detonate.
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Mohammad Imran and Mohammad Hanif, members of the banned Islamic militant Harkat-ul-Mujahideen group Photograph: Reuters
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Instead, they detonated the bomb outside the US consulate on June 14th, killing 12 people and seriously wounding over 20.
"I, along with my other friends, were involved in the US bombing," Mr Mohammad said. "We acted in consultation. One of our friends, who was willing to be a suicide bomber, carried out the attack."
Major-General Salahuddin, head of the paramilitary Pakistan Ranger force investigating the blast, told the news conference that Hanif and two colleagues had also been responsible for attacks on Western targets such as fast-food chains.
"We were able to nab three main culprits. They were involved in this consulate bombing," he said.
He said those arrested were members of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen al-Almi organization, a group said to have close links to the Taliban.
The faction is also reported to have links to separatists fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen has long been on a blacklist of organizations deemed "terrorist" by the United States.
The three arrested in Karachi included the al-Almi offshoot group's head, Mohammad Imran, who was also paraded at the news conference. Mohammad Hanif was the deputy head and chief of the militant wing, while the third man was named as Mohammad Ahmed.
The June attack on the US consulate was the fourth on Western targets in Pakistan this year. In May, a suicide car bomber killed 11 French engineers and two Pakistanis outside a Karachi hotel, while US reporter Mr Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in the same volatile city in January and later killed. A grenade attack on a church in Islamabad in March killed five people, including three foreigners.