Pakistan arrests 4 militants in connection to suicide bombing at Islamabad court

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan on Friday announced the arrest of four militants over their alleged involvement in a deadly suicide bombing outside a district court in the capital, a breakthrough in an investigation launched after the attack killed 12 people and wounded 28 others.

The men are suspected members of the outlawed Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, which is a separate group but closely allied to the Afghanistan Taliban. One of the suspects, Sajid Ullah, is believed to have handled the bomb used in the suicide attack on the court in Islamabad on Tuesday, the government said in a post on social media platform X.

The men were detained in a joint operation by the nation’s Intelligence Bureau and Counter-Terrorism Department, the government said.

The arrests came a day after Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said Afghan nationals carried out suicide bombings in Islamabad and northwest Pakistan earlier this week.

Ullah told investigators that Saeed-ur-Rehman, a TTP commander, ordered the attack in Islamabad through the Telegram messaging app. The commander, also known as Daadullah, sent Ullah photographs of the suicide bomber, an Afghanistan citizen, with orders to receive him after he crossed the border into Pakistan from Afghanistan, where he was a resident of Nangarhar province, the government said.

Ullah arranged accommodation for the attacker near Islamabad and later retrieved an explosive suicide vest from a graveyard in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Daadullah’s instructions before transporting the vest to the capital, the government said.

Daadullah, originally from Pakistan’s Bajaur region, is part of TTP’s intelligence wing and currently hiding in Afghanistan, the government said.

Naqvi, Pakistan’s interior minister, said Thursday that Afghan citizens were involved in the Islamabad bombing on Tuesday and an attack Monday in the northwestern city of Wana, where gunmen stormed a cadet college and began a gun battle that lasted nearly 20 hours. Three soldiers and all the attackers were killed.

The attacks underscored Pakistan’s deteriorating security climate as the country faces a resurgence in militancy, increasingly fraught relations with Afghanistan’s government in its capital, Kabul, and a fragile cross-border ceasefire.

Until Tuesday’s blast, Islamabad was considered safer than the country’s northwest, which has suffered from repeated violence.

TTP representatives did not comment on the arrests, which also came days after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif offered to undertake talks with Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government in a renewed peace overture while urging Kabul to rein in the TTP.

On Friday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi thanked Qatar and Turkey for facilitating Pakistan’s talks with Afghanistan and said Islamabad remained committed to resolving issues with Kabul through dialogue.

“Pakistan has never eschewed dialogue with any government in Kabul,” he said, adding that when the Taliban came into power in Afghanistan, Pakistan expected that government eventually would be able to control attacks in Pakistan emanating from Afghanistan.

“During these years, Pakistan also tried to positively engage with the Afghan Taliban regime, offering bilateral trade assistance, bilateral trade concessions and humanitarian assistance,” he said, noting that despite positive gestures from Pakistan, the response from Afghanistan’s Taliban government “has only been hollow promises and inaction.”

There was no immediate response from Kabul to the comments by Andrabi.

Kabul is attempting to give the impression that militants hiding in Afghanistan are refugees, he said.

“This is not a humanitarian or refugee crisis but a ploy to frame terrorists as refugees,” Andrabi said. “Among Afghan Taliban, there are elements who do not want confrontation with Pakistan, but there is a strong lobby with monetary support from foreign actors that has been tasked to stoke tension.”

Those people, he said, have “engaged in abuses and outrageous allegations against Pakistan and, in doing so, they are fast eroding whatever goodwill they had within Pakistan.”

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Riaz Khan and Rasool Dawar in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Ishtiaq Mahsud in Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan, contributed to this report.