Pakistan confirms arrest of militants

Seizes leader tied to Mumbai attacks

(Associated Press)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The Pakistan government publicly confirmed yesterday that its forces had seized two militant leaders, including the operational commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group suspected by India and the United States of carrying out the Mumbai attacks.

The confirmation of the arrest of the Lashkar leader, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, was made by Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmad Mukhtar in an interview on Indian television. It was the furthest the authorities in Pakistan have gone in acknowledging the possible complicity of Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Mumbai attacks last month, which killed 171.

Mukhtar identified the second militant leader arrested as Masood Azhar, head of Jaish-e-Muhammad, another banned militant group based in Pakistan.

Azhar, who was freed in 1999 in exchange for hostages on a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar, Afghanistan, was on a list presented to Pakistan by the Indian government days after the attacks in Mumbai. The list contained the names of 20 suspects wanted in connection with other terrorist attacks and pending criminal cases.

Lakhvi "has been picked up," Mukhtar said, according to the television channel CNN-IBN. "About Masood Azhar, I don't think we had decided yesterday to pick him up but our president is determined that we remove all irritants and as a small irritant he has been picked up." He said that President Asif Ali Zardari was "determined that we must cooperate with India."

Zardari himself, in an op-ed article published in yesterday's edition of The New York Times, said Pakistan empathizes with India's pain and said that Pakistan "is committed to the pursuit, arrest, trial, and punishment of anyone involved in these heinous attacks." But Zardari also cautioned India against what he called "hasty judgments and inflammatory statements."

After mounting pressure from the United States and India, Pakistani authorities on Sunday raided a camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, Pakistani and American officials said.

That operation appeared to be Pakistan's first concrete response to the demands from India and the United States to take action against the militants suspected in the attacks, which have raised tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors to their highest point in years.

Since then, the authorities have carried out raids on at least five more offices of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Associated Press reported yesterday.