Accused Bomber’s Pakistan Connection Emerges : Terrorism: Karachi police see links between man charged in Trade Center blast, local hit men and Muslims suspected in recent violence.

In a major breakthrough, police in Pakistan’s most violent city have uncovered a three-way linkage of local killers-for-hire, a virulently anti-Shiite Muslim party and accused World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.

Police were tight-lipped about the investigation pending notification of higher authorities, and many pieces of the puzzle have yet to be discovered. But more information than ever has emerged about the Pakistan connection of the 27-year-old now incarcerated in Manhattan.

“We have solved all the cases. This is a major achievement,” Javed Iqbal, Karachi deputy inspector general of police, said Saturday, while refusing to make public any specifics.

In the 24-hour period that ended early Friday, the Muslim holy day, police in Karachi arrested at least four members of Haqiqi, a splinter group of the Mohajir National Movement. Haqiqi is headed by Afaq Ahmed Khan, who is known as an extortionist and a virulent anti-American, sources close to the investigation said.

They said the arrested men were behind the February attacks on two Shiite mosques in the city, in which 20 people were gunned down, and the invasions of the homes of two families in which 11 people were murdered.

Those incidents had seemed part of the sectarian and ethnic bloodshed that has become routine in Karachi, where almost 500 people have been murdered in the past three months, including two American employees of the U.S. Consulate slain in a street ambush on March 8.

But a different picture of the violent and well-planned crimes emerged when police interrogated the four suspects from Haqiqi and obtained the bills from five cellular telephones seized along with jewels, money and other stolen valuables in their homes.

That evidence, plus a list of phone numbers found at one suspect’s house, showed that the Haqiqi hit men had been in close contact with a Sunni Muslim extremist party, the Sipah-e-Sahaba, the sources said.

One source said the men under arrest had apparently, for a price, murdered Shiite Muslims for the hard-line Sunni organization, while they simultaneously targeted members of the mainstream Mohajir group for Haqiqi.

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When a Shiite mosque in Karachi was stormed in a Feb. 25 attack that claimed six lives, one of the Haqiqi gunmen reportedly used a mobile telephone to report the death toll to Sipah-e-Sahaba.

The triggerman chose a grisly metaphor from the game of cricket, saying, “We won the inning by six wickets,” one source said.

Those ties, and Yousef’s links to some Sipah-e-Sahaba members, raised new questions about the sources of his financial support and protection inside Pakistan, a moderate Muslim state now rent by numerous ethnic and political disputes and mounting violence between Sunni and Shiite militants.

Sipah-e-Sahaba, based in Pakistan’s Punjab province, is believed to receive money from Saudi Arabia. As for Haqiqi and its murderous feud with the mainstream Mohajir movement, it has enjoyed almost overt sponsorship from the Pakistani armed forces and the Intelligence Bureau, which reports to the Interior minister.

In fact, the Pakistani army may have created Haqiqi, whose name means authentic , in a vain bid to demolish the bigger Mohajir National Movement, which controls entire Karachi residential and business districts and is now hostile to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s government.

Using the phone bills and list of numbers, Pakistani police were searching Saturday for as many as 200 other gunmen involved in Karachi’s strife. Police said officials may hold a news conference today to announce the results of their sweep.

Working in parallel, Pakistani investigators established that some Sipah-e-Sahaba members had been acquaintances or accomplices of Yousef, who, in documents filed in Manhattan federal court last month, said he was in fact a Pakistani named Abdul Basit.

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Two Sipah-e-Sahaba activists who allegedly were Yousef associates, Arif Tajik and Hafiz Dur Mohammed, the latter the imam of a Karachi mosque, were arrested in late March.

The two, who have not been charged in any of Karachi’s major crimes, were apparently fingered by another Yousef acquaintance, 24-year-old Abdul Shakoor, who was arrested about the same time in Peshawar.

One newspaper’s account said Shakoor was nabbed at the Peshawar railway station carrying explosives on his way to Karachi. That could not be independently verified.

But one high-ranking Karachi police official said the Sunni militant had fought, like Yousef, in the Afghan jihad, or Muslim holy war, against the Soviets and their Afghan Communist allies, and joined Sipah-e-Sahaba after returning home to Pakistan.

It apparently was Shakoor, and not six suspected Yousef associates arrested earlier in Peshawar, as originally reported by Pakistani officials, who told police that Yousef had been in Karachi in 1993 and injured himself while trying to make a bomb.

Bhutto, campaigning that autumn for a second term as Pakistan’s head of government, has said Yousef was bent on assassinating her.

Yousef was injured while making explosives in a Karachi neighborhood about four miles from Bhutto’s residence, police reported after investigating Shakoor’s claims. He was treated for an eye injury.

According to one unverified account in a Pakistani newspaper, Shakoor said Yousef had conceived the idea of killing Bhutto, a moderate and pro-Western Muslim leader, because he was told that her Pakistani People’s Party government in 1988-90 authorized the assassination of Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, founder-president of Sipah-e-Sahaba.

According to Pakistani press accounts, Shakoor also claimed under interrogation that Yousef hates Shiites--the minority sect that accounts for no more than 10% of all Muslims worldwide--and that he was behind a June attack at a Shiite shrine in Iran. That explosion killed 70 people, and the Iranian government blamed the rebel Moujahedeen Khalq for the attack.

Yousef’s involvement in that terrorist act is still unproven, as is his claim that he is a Pakistani.

Speaking in Parliament on March 21, the Interior minister, retired Maj. Gen. Nasirullah Khan Babar, denied that Yousef was a Pakistani. Yousef was born in Kuwait and has three passports, Babar asserted.

Sipah-e-Sahaba was formed more than a decade ago and rapidly became a vehicle to express the resentment of poor Sunni farm workers and freeholders against the Shiite landowners of the Jhang area of Punjab. It is part of the governing coalition in that province, and its secretary general is a member of Pakistan’s National Assembly.

The Sunni group’s leader in Karachi, lawyer Atafiz Ahmed Baksh, was already in jail in Karachi on murder charges stemming from the March 10 bombing attack on a Shiite mosque in which 12 people perished. He recently was turned over to military intelligence, sources said.

On Feb. 7, Yousef was arrested at a guest house in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. He was extradited to the United States to stand trial on charges that he engineered the February, 1993, terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, in which six people died and more than 1,000 were injured.

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There is widespread speculation that the ambush of U.S. Consulate employees Jackie Van Landingham, 33, and Gary C. Durell, 45, a month after Yousef’s arrest was an act of reprisal for his speedy extradition. But Iqbal, the Karachi police official, said Saturday that, despite the breakthrough in investigating the city’s violent strife, the murder of the Americans has not yet been solved.

Bhutto, who will leave April 5 for a visit to the United States, has said that she hopes police will find the gunmen who killed the U.S. government employees before she goes.