Pakistani police were interrogating yesterday a man arrested at Karachi airport trying to board a plane for the Middle East with batteries and an electrical circuit hidden in his shoes.
The 30-year-old civil engineer, who was detained Sunday when a scanner sounded an alarm as he proceeded towards boarding a Thai Airways flight to Muscat, allegedly told police that his footware was an inbuilt massage system.
The bearded man, who was not carrying explosives, allegedly told interrogators he came from the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Taliban and Islamist militants have a presence.
The suspect was named as Faiz Mohammad.
Airport Security Force spokesman Mohammad Munir termed as “worrying” the discovery of four batteries, a circuit and an on-off button secreted in his shoes, which he said could easily have triggered a bomb.
“The devices found from the suspect suggested that if he was carrying explosive material, he could have easily blown the explosives up in the plane,” Munir said.
Strict security arrangements are in place and flights now operating normally from Karachi, Munir said.
Karachi chief police investigator Niaz Khoso said Mohammad had been handed over to his department and had described the batteries and circuit as a vibrating foot-massage contraption.
“During preliminary investigation, he told us that the circuit in his shoes was for vibration to give him a comfort massage and that he wears such shoes to ease fatigue he usually suffers due to work,” Khoso said.
Police sent the shoes for expert analysis to verify the claim while the man is questioned by police investigators and other agencies, he said.
“We have not yet cleared the man and he will be questioned by a joint investigation team to ascertain whether he is innocent,” he said.
The suspect allegedly told investigators that he lived in Karachi, but was planning to return to Muscat, where he had previously worked for a construction company, to set up his own business.
A British man, Richard Reid, tried to blow up a transatlantic jet in December 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes.
Sunday’s arrest comes a week after US agents arrested a Pakistani-American man, Faisal Shahzad, for allegedly attempting to blow up a car bomb in New York.
The US has accused the Pakistani Taliban of being behind the plot to detonate a car bomb in Times Square on May 1 and has ratcheted up pressure on Pakistan to crack down on Islamist havens along the Afghan border.
“We’ve now developed evidence that shows that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack,” US Attorney General Eric Holder said on ABC television.
“We know that they helped facilitate it. We know that they probably helped finance it, and that he was working at their direction,” he said.
US General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, has reportedly urged Pakistan’s army chief to launch an operation in the tribal district of North Waziristan, an al-Qaeda and Taliban stronghold.
Shahzad, who was arrested in New York on Monday last week on board a plane as it was about to take off for Dubai, has reportedly told investigators he was trained in bomb-making in Waziristan.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of