PESHAWAR (The Thursday Times) — A former Afghan National Army soldier accused of training suicide bombers and planning attacks on Pakistani security posts has been arrested in an intelligence-based operation in Tirah Valley, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police said on Wednesday.
Additional Inspector General Abbas Ahsan told a press conference in Peshawar that the suspect, identified as Hikmatullah, alias Hamza, son of Noor Muhammad, was arrested on November 7 in a joint operation by security forces and law enforcement agencies after he travelled through the valley. He said the man had tried to attack a security forces’ post before he was tracked down. “This is a very important breakthrough for us,” Ahsan said.
According to Ahsan, Hikmatullah is from Mangiara village in the Chamkani area of Afghanistan’s Paktia province. He served in the Afghan National Army, where he had three months of military training followed by three months of commando training. After that army was disbanded, he allegedly moved between madrasas, using his skills to train recruits, and at the Khalid bin Waleed madrasa near Jalalabad he trained a student as a suicide bomber, Ahsan said.
A second suspect still at large
A suspected suicide bomber who was with Hikmatullah, named by police as Akram, is still being tracked. “We are tracking him and will arrest him very soon. We will also dismantle his entire network,” Ahsan said. Investigators say call records and location data from the arrested man’s phone trace his contacts on both sides of the border.
Police said Hikmatullah had been associated with the Hafiz Gul Bahadur group and had served as a bodyguard to one of its commanders, identified as Mansoor.
‘Planned openly’
“Afghanistan is providing every kind of facilitation to the Fitna al-Khawarij,” Ahsan said, using the state’s term for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. “Recruitment against us takes place openly there, calls for war against us are made openly, and terrorist activities against Pakistan are planned openly.”
Mahmood Jan, the information adviser to the province’s Area Development Secretariat, said Pakistan had repeatedly presented evidence of Afghan territory being used for attacks against it. “This is not just one terrorist. It is an entire chain, a network that does not seem to come to an end,” he said.
