September 23, 2003 ☼ Security

As mentioned in my previous post, Musharraf has produced another worthy from the al Qaeda roll of honour timed to coincide with his latest trip to the US. The Washington Post has pointed this out too in today’s article Pakistan Captures Terror Chief’s Brother . It says

Several of Pakistan’s high-profile arrests of suspected terrorists have coincided with major international diplomatic events.

Exactly a year after Sept. 11, 2001, a suspected planner of the attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, was captured in the southern city of Karachi. Then, in June, three days after Musharraf met President Bush in the United States, authorities arrested another al-Qaida operative and seized a video cassette that was purportedly of bin Laden warning of attacks against U.S. interests.

Pakistani officials have denied that they orchestrate the timing of the operations, saying the link is coincidental. The peson in question, Rusman Gunawan alias Gungun is the brother of Hambali, the terrorist mastermind of Jemaah Islamiah. According to this Straits Times report Gungun, a vegetable seller from West Java, was studying at Abu Bakar Islamic University in Pakistan on a Pakistan government scholarship. Now what do you call a government that sponsors students to study at what the newspaper describes to be ’a suspected hub for Muslim miltants ?

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Richard Haass spot on

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