7 British Terror Suspects Also Pakistani Citizens

Officials investigating the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners say at least seven of the suspects arrested in Britain had dual citizenship and made frequent trips here in the last three years, gaining information on how to make detonators and explosives.

Most of the suspects detained in Britain also had met with Rashid Rauf, 25, whom Pakistani authorities arrested two days before the alleged cell was broken up on Aug. 10, a senior Pakistani government source said.

Officials say Rauf, who is related by marriage to a prominent Islamic militant, was a key figure in the suspected plot to detonate liquids on as many as 10 planes. Funding and some of the militants involved in the plot might have come from as far away as Africa, Pakistani officials say.

The new details appear to highlight Pakistan’s role as a virtual bazaar for would-be terrorists run by militant groups allied with Al Qaeda.

Investigators say they still don’t know whether the suspects were being directed by militants in Pakistan or came here seeking inspiration and expertise for a plot that was hatched in Britain.

And though it is unclear whether they received practical training in making bombs, officials here say they are certain that British-based plotters at least received information on detonators and explosives.

U.S. officials say they are concerned about intelligence suggesting that Pakistan has become a place where militants and Al Qaeda operatives assist and train Islamic militants from Europe, and potentially from the United States.

The country’s perceived role as a center of Islamic militancy has its roots in the 1980s insurgency against Soviet forces in neighboring Afghanistan, when the U.S. funneled billions of dollars in covert aid and training through Pakistan to groups that then spawned anti-Western militants.

Pakistan still has a large pool of fighters who know how to use explosives and small arms in insurgent attacks. Pakistani authorities refer to some of the most dangerous as ATBs, short for “Afghan-trained boys,” and say they number at least 3,000.

For its part in a shaky peace process with neighboring India, Pakistan has sharply cut the number of militants infiltrating into the Indian-held portion of Kashmir, leaving thousands of trained militants with time to focus on other areas.

Groups preaching holy war against the West also produce DVD videos that are big sellers, particularly in the markets of militant hubs such as the northern city of Peshawar and southern Punjab province.

The DVDs, which sell for about $1, are dubbed in Urdu and Pashto for audiences in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in Arabic. Some merchants say they sell 40 to 50 of them on a good day.

“Suicide bombing is the only way to defeat a tough enemy,” says a bearded, middle-aged man claiming to be a suicide bomber on a DVD titled “Reality of Death.”

“Go straight to heaven and send your enemy to hell.”

His message is followed by video of an explosion. A text appears on the screen that claims, apparently falsely, that he killed 13 U.S. Marines in Afghanistan in a suicide attack. No such attack has been reported by the U.S. military.

Other DVDs show people receiving training from Taliban fighters. One shows young men registering to become suicide bombers.

Two of the British suspects have been released without charge, but 23 are expected to remain in custody at least until next week. A British court is scheduled to rule on whether they can be held for further investigation without being charged.

Pakistani officials said Rauf acknowledged under interrogation that he had met with an Arab, whom they described only as “an active Al Qaeda leader,” along the Pakistani-Afghan border.

Rauf was under surveillance for several months before he was arrested in Bahawalpur, a city in Punjab province where the outlawed militant group Jaish-e-Muhammed is headquartered. Investigators in the suspected British plot are focusing on an offshoot of that group.

Officials have linked Rauf with two prominent militants. They have said he met with Matiur Rehman, Pakistan’s most-wanted terrorism suspect and the reputed head of Al Qaeda’s operations in the country. Rehman is a suspect in failed attempts to kill Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and in a 2002 car bombing that killed 11 French technicians and three others in Karachi.

Pakistani officials also say Rauf is related by marriage to another important militant, Maulana Masood Azhar, a Muslim cleric and former journalist whose links to anti-American attacks date to the early 1990s.

Azhar has claimed involvement in attacks against U.S. troops in Somalia in 1993 and the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. One of his lieutenants was convicted of masterminding the kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

One U.S. counter-terrorism official said that Pakistani militant groups had been providing Islamic militants with expert training in explosives, weapons use and other guerrilla warfare techniques for many years.

The groups and many splinter organizations have potentially hundreds of camps spread throughout Pakistan’s cities and remote mountainous regions. Some are similar to but smaller than those once operated by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Others are hidden in the back rooms of religious schools or other places where militants congregate. A U.S. counter-terrorism official said those sites are nearly impossible to identify and dismantle. If they are discovered, they are resurrected somewhere else or even in the same place, the official and others said.

The senior Pakistani government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter, said investigators believed that money for the alleged airliner plot came from sources in South Africa, and that authorities were working with South African officials to trace those involved. He said most of them were from southern and eastern Africa, and that the amount of money involved was “huge.”

Investigators are also looking for a suspect from Eritrea, who is presumed to be hiding in Pakistan’s rugged border region or may already have fled into Afghanistan, officials said.

Ties to Africa would be a similarity to the July 2005 bomb attacks on London’s transit system, which killed 56 people, including the four bombers. The investigation of those attacks led to Zambia, where Haroon Rashid Aswat, a Briton of Indian descent and suspected Al Qaeda figure, was arrested.

British and U.S. investigators questioned him about 20 calls made to the London bombers on a cellphone linked to him. But it was not clear whether Aswat had made the calls, and he ultimately was not charged.

Two weeks after the attacks in London, a group of East Africans led by an Eritrean who is believed to have visited Pakistan tried to copy the attacks, but their backpack bombs did not fully explode.

U.S. officials are particularly concerned about U.S. citizens who have traveled to and from Pakistan for training and possible plotting of attacks. One of them was Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani American who grew up in Queens, N.Y., and has been quietly cooperating with the international investigation of the London transit bombings.

Babar has been linked to those attacks, as well as an alleged Al Qaeda effort to conduct detailed surveillance of financial institutions in New York, Washington and Newark, N.J. He told authorities that he conspired with top Al Qaeda leaders to organize a training camp in Pakistan and to blow up other targets in Britain such as Heathrow Airport.

In another case, 11 young Muslim men in the Washington area who trained in part through paintball games, were accused of conspiring to commit offenses against the U.S. Officials charged that one of the men had traveled to Pakistan and trained with the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

This year, nine of the 11 were convicted or pleaded guilty, and received prison sentences of as much as 20 years.

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Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella in London and Josh Meyer in Washington contributed to this report.