Punjabi and Pushtun militants behind Manawan attack

LAHORE: The Pakistani authorities investigating the 30/3 bloody assault on the Police Training School in Manawan on the outskirts of Lahore believe the highly trained and equally equipped terrorist squad involved in the Monday attack most likely belonged to the same group of the Punjabi militants and are backed by their like-minded Taliban jehadis from South Waziristan which had targeted the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team on March 3 at the Liberty Chowk in Lahore.

The attackers killed eight police cadets before being overwhelmed by a massive counter operation jointly carried out by the Pakistan Army, Rangers and Police. Four militants died during the assault, while three suspects have been captured. The investigators say they have solid evidence to suggest that the Manawan raid was a coordinated operation carried out by the Punjabi Taliban with the logistic support of the South Waziristan-based Tehrik-e-Taliban ameer Baitullah Mehsud which had earlier attempted to target the Sri Lankan cricket team on March 3 in Lahore. They say the attack on the police academy was possibly a retaliatory act by the Punjabi and Pushtun militants against the Pakistan government’s growing cooperation with Washington in hunting down the Pakistan-based Al-Qaeda and Taliban linked jehadi leaders.

According to the investigators, an aide of the Manawan attackers, Hijrat Ullah alias Nadeem Asghar, who was captured alive from outside the police training centre during the operation, has already confessed having been sent by Baitullah Mehsud. The attack was carried out four days after the US State Department had authorised a reward of up to $ 5 million for information leading to the location, arrest, and/or conviction of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan’s leader Baitullah Mehsud who is being regarded by the Americans as a key Al-Qaeda facilitator in the lawless tribal region of South Waziristan.

The investigators point out that the Manawan attackers had many features in common with the assailants of the Liberty assault and there was a possibility that those involved in the 3/3 episode had also taken part in the 30/3 attack since none of them had been arrested either during or after the gruesome operation that killed half a dozen policemen. Although the Manawan attack came three weeks after the Liberty ambush on the Sri Lankan cricket team, the authorities have so far avoided naming any particular group, amidst contradictory media reports regarding the involvement of the Indian intelligence agency, the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

As far as the similarities between the appearance and tactics of the Liberty and the Manawan attackers are concerned, the investigators say those involved in the Monday attack too carried backpacks stuffed with highly sophisticated arms and ammunition, as well as bottled water and dried food items, showing that they had actually anticipated a protracted siege. The second common feature was that the attackers had acted under a well-researched and equally organised strategy after getting prior information about the ins and outs of the Manawan building. The third common feature was the use of hand grenades by the terrorists at the police training centre to begin the operation, followed by erratic firing at police jawans with the sole aim of killing them, as had happened in the Liberty attack.

Asked about the identity of those involved in the Manawan attack, Advisor on Interior Rehman Malik said the assault was similar to the Mumbai terror strike. He told Geo TV that the terror strike in Lahore was similar to the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai that left 170 people dead. Malik hinted that home-grown militant groups were involved in Monday raid. “Who is supporting them? Who is giving them weapons? Everyone knows these banned groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad”, he added. A few hours later, having reached Lahore after the operation came to an end, Rehman Malik told newsmen that the agencies had prior information about such an attack on a police training installation.

Asked if any of the attackers had been arrested alive, Malik said while most of them had been killed by the security forces during the operation, three of them blew themselves up before being arrested. However, he added that an alleged companion of the attackers had been arrested from outside the building of the police training school who is being interrogated by the authorities to ascertain if he belonged to the same group. Asked about the findings of the Liberty attack investigations, the advisor on interior said the authorities have already obtained solid evidence about those involved in the 3/3 attack and that they are about to expose them.

To recall, six policemen and a Pakistan Cricket Board van driver lost their lives when a group of a dozen terrorists ambushed Sri Lankan cricketers’ convoy near the Liberty roundabout in Lahore on March 3, 2009. Six of the Sri Lankan players suffered injuries. A four-member police team, headed by Punjab’s Additional Inspector-General of Police (Investigation) Salahuddin Khan Niazi, and another joint investigation team comprising officials of the Federal Investigation Agency, Inter Services Intelligence and Intelligence Bureau, was subsequently established by the ministry of interior to investigate the matter and submit a report to the federal government.

Well placed sources in the country’s security establishment say despite having acquired solid evidence regarding the involvement of Punjab militants in the 3/3 terrorist attack, the Pakistani authorities are reluctant to formally name the group for unknown reasons. After preliminary investigations into the Liberty assault, the authorities had first suspected the Lashkar-e-Toiba, saying the attack on the Sri Lankan team might have been an attempt to take the players hostage and to demand the release of Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the chief operational commander of the LeT who had been arrested by the Pakistani authorities in December 2008 and is presently being tried in Rawalpindi by an Anti Terrorist Court (ATC) for his alleged involvement in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. But the LeT has strongly refuted its involvement in the attack.

However, while changing tack, the Pakistani advisor on interior Rehman Malik had ruled out the involvement of the Lashkar-e-Toiba in the Liberty attack in the second week of March while talking to newsmen in Islamabad. His statement was followed by some media reports, quoting official sources and saying that the 3/3 operation was actually carried out by an al-Qaeda-linked Sunni sectarian banned terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). These reports had named an al-Qaeda linked LeJ leader Matiur Rehman as the mastermind of the attack, adding that it was actually planned with the coordination of Baitullah Mehsud led Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.

As Pakistan shared with Sri Lanka the findings of preliminary investigations into the attack on its cricket team on March 25, without naming any particular group, a section of the Pakistan media accused India for the assault, saying the rocket-launchers and explosives used during the terrorist operation on the Sri Lankan cricket team are in the use of Indian forces. These reports cited a forensic report prepared by the Pakistani experts and saying that the four rocket-launchers and nine explosives seized from the crime scene are factory-made and used by Indian forces. According to the findings by Pakistani authorities, 40 grenades, 10 sub-machine guns, five pistols, 577 live rounds of SMGs and 160 bullets of pistols were also found from the site.

The Pakistani authorities point out that the Manawan attack came hardly three days after the American military leadership claimed to have acquired evidence that elements within Pakistani military intelligence, the ISI, continue to provide support for the Taliban. The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen said in a CNN interview on March 27, 2009 that the ISI had links with militants on both the Pakistani borders with Afghanistan and India. “Fundamentally, that is one of the things that has to change”, he said. In another interview to the PBS the same day, the head of US Central Command General David Petraeus, said some of the militant groups had been established by the ISI and that their links continued.

Petraeus said there was evidence that in the fairly recent past, the ISI had tipped off militants when their positions were in danger. “It is a topic that is of enormous importance, because if there are links and if those continue and if it undermines the operations against Islamic militants, obviously that would be very damaging to the kind of trust that we need to build”, said General Petraeus. These statements were followed by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates’s March 29 remarks: “What we need to do is try and help the Pakistanis understand these groups are now an existential threat to them and we will be there as a steadfast ally for Pakistan”.

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