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Karachi mosque bombing: Imam was Lashkar’s front man using cop

* Cleric, the same age as the cop, had been ‘very friendly’ with him
* Literature found in cleric’s house included ‘a guide for Jihadis’

By Hasan Mansoor and Intikhab Ali

KARACHI: Investigators probing the devastating suicide bombing attack on a Shia mosque in Karachi on May 7 have confirmed the banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni Deobandi terrorist group, was “directly involved in the attack.”

The literature and many clues found from the house of the absconding pesh imam of a Lyari mosque show the attack, which killed 20 people and injured more than 100, “was masterminded by the Lashkar and the man in front was Murtaza, who was pesh imam of the mosque,” a senior investigator told Daily Times.

The records of Baghdadi police station relating to the bomber, Akbar Niazi, have been seized and the pesh imam of the mosque of Lyari’s Niazi Chowk area is also in custody, an investigator said. The pesh imam was “very friendly with Akbar,” he added. Police are reported to have found jihadi literature, including “A Guide for Jihadis,” and many other important clues from the house of the pesh imam, who is 24, the same age as Niazi.

Sources in the police said their department had also arrested four accomplices of the pesh imam and were interrogating them for their possible connection with terrorist outfits. “The literature we have found from the pesh imam’s house confirms that Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was directly involved in the incident,” an investigator said.

“But Niazi’s direct involvement with the group has not yet been established, except that they could have motivated him recently,” he added. “We are questioning his family members about the friends who used to visit him, or whom he visited. We are also questioning policemen who were close to him,” the investigator said.

The police also conducted raids on a number of madrasas in Karachi and took an unspecified number of people from there for questioning.

Niazi, himself a resident of Lyari Town, fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan until the late 1990s and then joined the police a couple of years ago.

He belonged to a religious family from Punjab’s Mianwali district and was believed to have had “dangerous jihadis” for his close friends, investigators grilling his father Kashmir Khan, two brothers and two of his friends, told Daily Times.

“He was a dangerous man while he was being recruited in the police force, but he managed to secure a positive character certificate from the Baghdadi police station,” a senior police official said.

His father told investigators that Niazi left the house a day before the attack on the mosque, wearing police uniform, and did not return. The dead bomber was identified from the buckle of his police belt, part of which was found in the mosque, according to the investigator. However, investigations show Niazi had not been involved in any criminal acts in the past.

The interrogation team of Karachi police detained several people, including a policeman, in connection with the bl bk g, sources said. His father’s blood samples have been sent to Lahore’s Centre of Excellence for Molecular Biology to determine if one of the two unidentified bodies whose flesh and limbs were found in the mosque was of that of Niazi.

Investigators said they hoped Sindh Police would receive the DNA report next week. An investigator who asked not to be named referred to one of Niazi’s friends as saying that in his last days the policeman was a frequent visitor to the mosque where he would offer prayers and recite Holy Quran for hours. “He seldom spoke those days,” the investigator quoted the man as saying. Niazi was the first terrorist mole in a law-enforcement agency to be used in a suicide attack. Previously, the police found Nadeem Abbas, killed along with Asif Ramzi, the chief of his own faction of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, in a mysterious blast in a warehouse in Korangi on Dec. 19, 2002.

Nadeem was a constable in the Sindh Anti-Corruption Establishment and an activist of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan. Earlier, Sindh Rangers had arrested one of its inspectors, Wasim Akhtar, and accused him of being involved in plotting an aborted conspiracy to kill President Pervez Musharraf on April 26, 2002, when the general was leading a motorcade during his campaign for the presidential referendum of April 30 that year.

The other was, Abdul Zaheer, a civilian employee of the fire brigade of the Naval Dockyard, also allegedly involved in another aborted conspiracy to kill the general the same evening.

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