Pakistan arrests militant group chief – India, Pakistan talks deferred after airbase attack
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ISLAMABAD, Jan 14, (RTRS): Pakistan has arrested the head of the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group on suspicion his outfit masterminded an attack this month on an air base in India, two officials said on Wednesday. Maulana Masood Azhar, an Islamist hardliner who was blamed for a 2001 attack on India’s parliament, was detained two days ago along with his brother and brother-inlaw and will remain in protective custody for at least 30 days, a senior intelligence official told Reuters.
Pakistan said earlier in the day that it had arrested several members of Azhar’s group and sealed off its offices as it investigates Indian assertions that the Jan 2 attack, in which seven military personnel were killed, was the work of the Pakistan-based militants.
The foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan — longtime, nuclear-armed arch-rivals on the Indian subcontinent — are set to hold a rare, previously scheduled meeting on Friday, part of a budding diplomatic thaw after decades of hostility. But India has demanded Pakistan take “prompt and decisive” action over the Jan. 2 air base attack before the meeting goes ahead. “We will keep them (Azhar and brothers) for as long as we need to carry out our investigation over India’s claims about the attack. We are resolved to take this investigation to its conclusion,” the senior intelligence official said.
A senior government official close to the investigation said that Azhar, who has been placed under house arrest in the past but never prosecuted, would be prosecuted this time if evidence connected him to the attack on the Pathankot air base. On Wednesday, Pakistan took the unusual step of announcing a highlevel team to investigate the incident, naming some of the country’s top counter-terrorism officers and officials from both military and civilian intelligence. India’s foreign ministry had no immediate comment, but said earlier it would decide late on Wednesday whether Foreign Secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar would travel to Islamabad on Friday for the meeting.
Promised
Islamabad, which India has long accused of backing Islamist militant attacks, promised to get to the bottom of who was behind the assault on the air base after India handed evidence to Pakistan that it said implicated Jaish-e-Mohammad. The Pakistani prime minister’s office said the government had made “considerable progress” in investigating the attack, and it wanted to send a team of special investigators to the Pathankot air base. “Based on the initial investigations in Pakistan, and the information provided, several individuals belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad, have been apprehended,” the office of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said. “The offices of the organization are also being traced and sealed. Further investigations are under way.” India and Pakistan have agreed to reschedule talks between their foreign secretaries, the Indian foreign ministry said on Thursday, after an attack on an Indian military base this month. Foreign ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup also said India welcomed the action taken by Pakistan against the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group that is blamed by Indian for the attack on the Pathankot airbase.
The foreign secretaries of the two countries had been due to meet on Friday in Islamabad. Swarup said they would meet in the “very near future”. Meanwhile, attackers on a motorcycle lobbed grenades and opened fire at a Pakistani television station on Wednesday, wounding one person, and left behind pamphlets linked to Islamic State, the station said. The attack on the ARY News Islamabad office was the second such assault on media premises in as many months by the militant group claiming a connection with Islamic State’s self-declared province of Khorasan in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Security guards chased away the drive-by attackers, it said, and an editor hit by shrapnel in the head was hospitalised. The pamphlets left behind said “Islamic State Khorasan Province” claimed responsibility for attacking media that it accused of “siding with the apostate army and government of Pakistan in their global crusade against Islam”. Pakistan’s army is fighting a military campaign against Taleban and other militants in the country’s northwest near the Afghan border.
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