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.
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