Pakistani police have arrested seven men belonging to an al-Qaeda-linked militant group who were planning to attack high profile targets in the country’s biggest city, Karachi.
The militants, which were believed to belong to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) group, were arrested in a raid in the upmarket Defense neighborhood where they had rented a bungalow, Superintendent of Police Fayyaz Khan said late on Sunday.
“All of these militants belong to the LEJ and they were planning to attack important government buildings and senior government officials,” Khan said.
PHOTO: AFP
“We have recovered three suicide jackets, four AK-47 rifles, four pistols and 15kg of explosives,” he said.
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed US ally, has seen an intensification of attacks by Islamist militants over the past two years.
It has responded since April with army offensives against militant strongholds in the northwest.
Karachi is Pakistan’s commercial hub and home to its main stock exchange and central bank.
Many foreign companies involved in Pakistan also have offices there.
Khan said one of the detained men, Muhammad Shahzad, had also been involved in planning an attack on former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf and another attack on former Pakistani prime minister Shaukat Aziz.
The Sunni Muslim LEJ is one of Pakistan’s most notorious al-Qaeda-linked groups that began by targeting minority Shiite Muslims.
It later graduated to more audacious attacks, such as the truck bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel in September last year in which 55 people were killed, the government says.
Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik told CNN on Sunday that security forces had in the past month foiled a militant attack on the parliament building in Islamabad.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS