Qaeda arrests called 'lucky' break
Dud cellphone bomb triggered key captures
WASHINGTON -- The recent string of high-profile arrests in Pakistan of Al Qaeda operatives accused of plotting against financial institutions in the United States resulted not from a meticulously planned counterterrorism operation, but from a lucky break, according to Pakistani police.
It was the kind of break investigators dream about: A cellphone that was to trigger an explosion on a busy road in Karachi failed to detonate the bomb.
The phone, connected to 18 pounds of explosives, led Pakistani police in the crowded port city to the bombmaker's house. There, police expected to find a local ''jihadi group" plotting violence against Pakistan, a police officer said. Instead, police found Musaad Aruchi, believed to be the nephew of a top Al Qaeda operative, who helped unravel the most comprehensive discovery of a terrorist plot against the United States since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Bush administration officials have touted the snowballing of arrests as proof of the president's success in the war against terror.
But Pakistani police credit the botched bombing, the cellphone discovery, and, more broadly, Pakistan's own internal war against extremists.
Just as Saudi Arabia's war on terror began in earnest when the violence threatened the Saudi royal family, Pakistan's intense investigations -- which have borne so much fruit for the United States -- also have at their root the Pakistani government's instinct for self-preservation, regional specialists and US officials say.
''Frankly, I think it is a mistake to think that Pakistanis are doing this for us, at our bidding," a State Department official said. ''They recognize that these groups are a threat to them."
Aruchi's arrest -- reportedly carried out with CIA assistance -- led Pakistani investigators and their US counterparts to Al Qaeda computer operative Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, who led police to Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who in turn led to Abu Musa al-Hindi, arrested last week in London, as well as to evidence of Al Qaeda's surveillance of the New York Stock Exchange, a New York
''It is a lucky thing," a Pakistani police official familiar with the case said in a telephone interview from the eastern city of Lahore. He said the police were not seeking a high-value Al Qaeda target, but what they thought were local militants who had attacked a Pakistani military official.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Pakistan pledged to reverse its support for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had close ties to Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency, and for other extremist groups.
But some analysts say the visible change in policy occurred only after extremist groups Pakistan had once openly supported turned against the government, launching assassination attempts aimed at President Pervez Musharraf and other high-ranking officials and staging sectarian bombings of local targets.
''There is no doubt in my mind that Musharraf intensified efforts after the attacks on his life," said Michael Krepon, South Asia project director at The Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization with a focus on international security and peace. ''Even before the attacks on Musharraf, there was a lot of evidence that the leadership of the country realized that Al Qaeda was an enemy, but after the attacks, I think we can trace a much more concerted effort to go after the foreigners in the tribal areas."
The violence has most recently come in the form of more than 60 attacks on gas pipelines and Shia Muslims in the Baluchistan region, home to many separatist groups and religious extremists who oppose the Shia form of Islam.
Musharraf was so shaken by the attempts on his life that he shifted responsibility for investigating them away from the ISI -- an agency with a long history of supporting extremist groups in the volatile Kashmir region and Afghanistan -- to military intelligence, according to Hassan Abbas, a former Pakistani police officer who is a PhD candidate at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Musharraf ''has developed skepticism of ISI involvement in protecting these extremist groups, of old ISI hands who are not ready to go by the change in policy," said Abbas, author of a soon-to-be released book titled ''Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism."
Abbas said that Musharraf personally called on a talented civilian police officer named Tariq Pervez to help investigate the assassination attempts against him and that Pervez's team helped with last week's arrest of Qari Saifullah Akhtar in the United Arab Emirates.
Akhtar, a prime suspect in an attack on Musharraf, is also an Al Qaeda associate who ran training camps in Afghanistan and leads an extremist group that had close Taliban ties.
The brazen daylight assassination attempt in June against Karachi's top military official marked a further escalation in Pakistan's own war on terror -- and netted the cellphone that wrapped up an international crew of suspects.
''The attack on the corps commander was key," said Krepon of the Stimson Center. ''If there was resistance among the senior military establishment to this effort, I suspect it evaporated at that moment. The attack meant that this was not Musharraf-specific; this was an attack against the national security establishment of the country."
That ambush unfolded on the morning of June 10, on a main street in the center of Karachi not far from the US Consulate. Gunmen opened fire on the convoy of Lieutenant General Ahsan Saleem Hayat and then fled in a car, according to Major General Shaukat Sultan, spokesman for the armed forces. Hayat escaped injury, but at least 10 others died, Sultan said.
As the gunmen fled, a small bomb lying in the road exploded, according to Syed Kamal Shah, inspector general of police for the Sindh region, who said he arrived at the scene shortly after the shooting began. A second bomb left at a bridge -- which is believed to have been set up to kill emergency personnel responding to the first attack -- did not go off.
Shah said his team disarmed it before it could explode. ''We were lucky to have it defused in time," Shah said.
The botched bombing provided investigators with the phone that led them to a group of militants, including Aruchi, also known as Mosaib al Baluchi. He is believed to be the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The arrests turned up grenades, machine guns, detonators, and evidence linking Al Qaeda fighters to attacks in Karachi, the southwestern city of Kuata, and the tribal areas near the Afghan border, CNN reported on June 14. But the larger connection, that of a possible plot against financial nerve centers in Washington and New York, was being pieced together.
''We didn't know where we were heading and how far we could reach," the Pakistani official said.
Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com. 