Pakistan Accuses Afghan, Kashmiri Militants

A network of Kashmiri and Afghan militants was behind the latest assassination attempt on President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistani officials said Sunday.

Three suicide car bombers tried to ram explosives-laden vehicles into Musharraf’s limousine Thursday in Rawalpindi, 12 miles from the capital, Islamabad.

“It’s a huge network of terrorists having tentacles from Kashmir to Afghanistan,” Information Minister Sheik Rashid Ahmed said. “They also have international ties.”

A senior government official said, on condition of anonymity, that one of the suicide bombers was from the Pakistani-held part of Kashmir, while another was an Afghan who carried a fake Pakistani identity card.

The fake identity card showed his address to be in a town of North-West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, he said.

While Ahmed said investigators were close to making arrests, Abdur Rauf Chaudhry, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Islamabad, said Sunday that investigators had detained several suspects in the case in a village in the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir.

The men were taken into custody late Saturday in raids on their homes in Androt, a village about 45 miles northeast of Islamabad, Chaudhry said.

Chaudhry would not say how many men were detained, but a police official in the Androt area, speaking on condition of anonymity, put the number at three.

“They are being questioned. But they are not suspects or formally arrested,” Chaudhry said. He gave no other details.

Two pickup trucks believed to have been used in the attack were purchased in Rawalpindi a month before the attack, and officials say one of the buyers was from Kashmir. The man apparently led authorities to the three suspects detained in Androt, the police official said.

At least 14 people were killed and 46 hurt in last week’s attack, the second against Musharraf this month. A Dec. 14 bombing was on the same route.

Musharraf, a staunch ally of the United States in the “war on terror,” blamed Islamic extremists for the attacks.