Police were on red alert in the southern city of Karachi yesterday, fearing a militant backlash after a top Pakistani al-Qaeda suspect wanted for two assassination attempts against President General Pervez Musharraf was killed in a paramilitary raid.
Amjad Hussain Farooqi, also accused in the 2002 slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, died in the shootout Sunday at a house in the southern town of Nawabshah. Two or three other men, one of them an Islamic cleric, were arrested.
Fayyaz Leghari, deputy chief of police in Karachi, said security was on "red alert" in the city -- known as a hotbed for Islamic militants -- with increased patrols around foreign consulates and key government offices, and more plainclothes officers at sensitive locations.
Farooqi, a Pakistani aged about 32, was one of the most wanted men in the country after security officials revealed in May that he had helped plan two bombings against Musharraf near the capital in December last year that narrowly missed the general. Alleged co-planner, Libyan al-Qaeda suspect Abu Faraj al-Libbi, remains at large.
In Washington, a US official said intelligence services had been unable to obtain full confirmation that Farooqi had been killed although that appeared to be the case. The Americans consider Farooqi "a key al-Qaeda figure," the official said, speaking on condition he not be further identified.
Pakistani officials say they are certain that the dead man is Farooqi, although DNA tests have yet to be completed to confirm the identity of the body.
Farooqi is believed to have been an associate of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the reputed al-Qaeda No. 3 captured in Pakistan last year.
Pakistan has burnished its credentials as a key US ally against al-Qaeda in recent months. The government says it has arrested more than 70 terror suspects since mid-July, including an alleged Pakistani computer expert for al-Qaeda and a Tanzanian wanted for the US embassy bombings in east Africa in 1998.
Authorities hailed Farooqi's killing as another breakthrough, and information gleaned from the suspects captured in Sunday's raid led to the arrest of another Islamic militant early yesterday, police said.
Paramilitary police raided a home around dawn in Sukkur, 350km northeast of Karachi, arresting Khalid Ansari, known for links with Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Sunni Muslim militant group, a local police official said on condition of anonymity. Two of Ansari's brothers were also arrested.
The security forces had blared warnings over loudspeakers to residents in the poor residential neighborhood not to come out of their homes. The three men were blindfolded and led away by intelligence officials, he said.
It was unclear whether Ansari or his brothers faces any charges.
Officials have yet to formally identify the suspects who were arrested in Sunday's raid in which Farooqi was killed, but say they are all Pakistanis.
An intelligence official in Nawabshah, speaking on condition of anonymity, named one as Abdul Rehman, whom he said was a teacher at a local Islamic seminary and had rented the house for Farooqi two months ago.
Another intelligence official named a second suspect as Yaqoob Farooqi. It was unclear if he was related to the dead suspect.
Authorities also seized from the house a laptop computer, CDs, militant literature, some grenades, a wire cutter and several photos, the intelligence source in Nawabshah said.
He did not disclose who was in the pictures.
Zainul Abideen, who lived on the same street in Nawabshah -- where dozens of police and paramilitary rangers blocked access yesterday -- recounted seeing Farooqi before.
"He is the same man whose pictures we saw today in the newspapers. I have seen him going and coming on his bicycle," he said.
Farooqi's family say that he had been missing since Pearl was abducted in Karachi in January 2002.
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