Police probe Pakistan connection to attacks

BRITISH police have given Pakistan a list of terror suspects with possible links to the London attacks, officials said, as two religious schools denied ever hosting one of the bombers.

Authorities are pursuing information on 22-year-old British suicide attacker Shehzad Tanweer, who studied at a religious school in Pakistan last year, according to security officials.

“They provided us with names of certain individuals for information following the London bombing. We are checking the linkages here,” a senior security official said last night.

“We have asked the British government to provide specific information regarding the movement of suspected bombers in Pakistan,” added the official.

Ian Blair, commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, yesterday confirmed there was “a Pakistan connection” to the bombings.

Pakistani authorities said they were investigating whether Tanweer had links to local militant groups, understood to be Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba, both involved in fighting Indian forces in Kashmir.

The two groups are known to have ties with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.

Jaish is loosely linked with the Jamia Manzoorul Islamia school in the eastern city of Lahore, which denied British press reports that Tanweer had studied there.

“We have no knowledge that anyone with the name of Shehzad Tanweer was enrolled in our madrassa. Our records do not confirm this name,” Asadullah Farooq, son of madrassa leader Pir Saifullah Khalid, said. “The allegation is baseless. We do not entertain foreign students, we only have Pakistani students,” he added.

Lashkar-e-Taiba also denied that Tanweer visited a campus formerly linked to the group in Muridke, near Lahore. “We have checked our records, no one with this name and with British nationality ever stayed there. We do not have a policy of carrying out suicide attacks on civilians,” a spokesman for the group said from Lahore.

Pakistan’s education minister Javed Ashraf said that “to the best of our knowledge” there was no military training at the country’s network of some 10,000 madrassas, where up to

1.5 million students are educated.

“If the British government tells us which madrassas we will certainly look to take action,” he said.

Lashkar-e-Taiba was blamed for sheltering al-Qaida fugitives who fled Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

Security officials said Jaish teamed up with al-Qaida to carry out several attacks in Pakistan, including a bombing which killed 11 French engineers in the southern city of Karachi in 2002.

It was also involved in an assassination attempt on Pakistan’s ruler President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003, officials said.

Mr Musharraf telephoned British Prime Minister Tony Blair to pledge his full backing for the inquiry into the bombings.

Separately, Pakistani investigators last night said they were questioning a British man arrested on suspicion of ties to terror groups but he has no known links to the London attacks. Zeeshan Siddique, 25, was arrested on May 18 near the northwestern city of Peshawar after sneaking into Pakistan on fake documents.