Pakistan Holds Suspects in Trade Center Bomb Case

Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said Tuesday that more suspects believed to have links to the accused mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in New York are being arrested and that Pakistani police are seeking his uncle, the manager of a private charity.

“He was living in (the northern city of) Peshawar and nobody knew,” Bhutto told a group of U.S. correspondents.

None of those arrested have been charged with serious crimes, and a senior government official said no wrongdoing is suspected in the case of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef’s uncle, who was the regional manager for the Swiss-based charity Mercy International.

“We have nothing against him,” the official said, “but we want to use information from him to find out Yousef’s nationality and other facts about him.”

The official said a brother and brother-in-law of Yousef had also recently been in Pakistan and are being hunted by police. He provided no further details, such as the men’s nationalities or where authorities are looking for them.

The new developments hint at a much deeper Pakistani connection for the 27-year-old Yousef than had been previously known.

Informed sources in Peshawar said Yousef’s maternal uncle, Zahid Sheik, a Kuwaiti-educated man in his 40s, comes from Baluchistan, a largely lawless desert province in western Pakistan that borders Iran and Afghanistan. Some U.S. officials have maintained that Yousef was born there or that his family, residents of Kuwait, originally came from there.

In Quetta, Baluchistan’s capital, “some people” believed to have connections to Yousef were arrested Monday, Interior Minister Nasirullah Khan Babar said without providing details.

The province, Pakistan’s largest, is also believed to be the hide-out of Aimal Kansi, who is accused of shooting and killing two people and wounding three outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va, in January, 1993.

Pakistani authorities seem intent on using the Yousef case to prove to the United States that their country, which has served as a training ground and haven for extremists, no longer will welcome terrorists.

“What is obvious is that Pakistan is emerging now as a front-line state against terrorism, and Pakistan is in the vanguard of the movement to uncover militant groups that have been operating in different Muslim countries since the end of the Afghan war,” Bhutto said.

The prime minister leaves on an official visit to the United States on April 5. She said she will seek a lifting of the U.S. ban on aid to Pakistan, in place since 1990 because of the country’s nuclear weapons program, in order to help her moderate Islamic government combat drugs, terrorism and religious extremism.

Yousef, who was using forged Pakistani identity papers, was arrested in Islamabad, the capital, on Feb. 7 and extradited to the United States. He is charged with masterminding the Feb. 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center in New York that killed six people and injured more than 1,000.

U.S. prosecutors have said Yousef received bomb-making training in Peshawar, which served as the headquarters-in-exile of many of the rebel groups that fought Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed regime, which was toppled in 1992.

On Saturday, Bhutto said she had received credible information that Yousef had meant to kill her in Karachi in October, 1993. But the bomb blew up as he was transporting it, injuring him, she said.