Islamabad, May 5 (DPA) The Pakistani Taliban is unlikely to have the capacity to carry out attacks in the United States or Europe, a Pakistan Army spokesman said Wednesday.
“We have destroyed their hideouts, training centres and recruiting facilities in our recent action,” said Major General Athar Abbas. “I don’t think they now have the ability to attack targets in America or anywhere else in the world”.
The statement came three days after a group that said it was the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for a botched attempt to explode a car bomb in New York’s landmark Times Square Saturday.
US authorities arrested Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized US citizen of Pakistani origin, on charges of terrorism.
The suspect has admitted that he had attended a training centre in Pakistan’s Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border.
Shahzad, 30, comes from a wealthy family in Pakistan’s Pakhtunkhwa-Khyber, formerly known as North-West Frontier Province.
His father is a retired air vice marshal, who also served as the deputy director general of the civil aviation authority, a relative told reporters outside Shahzad’s family residence in Peshawar’s Hayatabd area Tuesday.
The family left the residence Tuesday and their whereabouts were not known.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Wednesday that no one in Pakistan had been arrested in connection with the New York bomb, but law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said they had detained several people, including some relatives, in a countrywide swoop.
A senior police official said that five people were arrested in Lahore and Rawalpindi in the eastern province of Punjab. Three arrests were made in the southern city of Karachi.
Shahzad was in the US from 1999, when he obtained a student visa at the age of 19.
He received a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2000 and a master’s degree in business administration in 2003.
Shahzad quit his job at a Connecticut-based marketing firm, put his house up for sale and returned to Pakistan in 2008 with his wife and two children, only to return to the US alone shortly afterwards.
According to a Pakistani official, Shahzad’s wife and children live in Karachi.
“He is such a nice guy. I cannot believe that he has been accused of terrorism,” said Shahzad’s cousin Sareerul Haq, who lives in Mohib Banada village in Nowshhra, about 43 km east of Peshawar.
A street vendor in Times Square had spotted smoke rising from a parked vehicle and alerted police, who discovered a homemade bomb that failed to detonate Saturday.
US authorities identified Shahzad as the car’s owner, and arrested him at John F Kennedy International Airport as he was trying to fly to Dubai. US Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that Shahzad was providing valuable information.
More than 150,000 Pakistani troops are conducting offensives in the tribal regions against Islamist insurgents who have attacked official and civilian targets inside Pakistan, killing thousands in recent years.
“We have broken their back. Their command and control system is destroyed,” the army spokesman said. “They have lost the operational capacity for big actions outside Pakistan”.
