Women suicide bombers

The News,
June 10, 2005
Arrest of alleged women suicide bombers will help curb extremists: Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: The arrest of two middle-class Pakistani sisters who allegedly trained to become suicide bombers has deflated a major threat to the country amid a renewed wave of sectarian bloodshed, officials said Friday.

Police had spent a year hunting for the female militants, named as Arifa and Habiba and said by officials to be the well-educated daughters of a wealthy bank executive.

Security officials said that, while on the run, the pair had each married a top member of the Sunni Muslim extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has links to Al-Qaeda and was implicated in the murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl.

"It removes a major threat because such an unusual attack using female suicide bombers would have wreaked a lot of damage," said a senior Pakistani official involved in the fight against sectarian terrorism. "It would have set an example for others to follow."

However, the women's mother insisted her daughters, the first women ever to be arrested on charges of being suicide bombers in Pakistan, were innocent. "My daughters are educated and religious," she told by telephone from the family home in Karachi. "They have performed the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca). But they are not suicide bombers."

She would not give her name, but her husband Sher Baluch Mohammed is a senior officer at a bank in Karachi.

"They went to a relative's house last year and have been missing since," the mother added. "We searched and searched but only today we came to know that they have been arrested.

"How can I accept this? Now we can only pray for their release. Everybody is pointing fingers towards our family, and we can only pray that peace returns to our family and our innocent daughters get released."

Investigators said the sisters were brainwashed by their uncle, Gul Hasan, who was sentenced to death last week for killing 45 people in two suicide attacks on Shiite mosques in Karachi in 2004.

Police sources said they suspected the two girls had stayed away from the family after Hasan was arrested in June last year, fearing their own arrest.

The women were arrested as they walked along a road near the northern tourist town of Swat along with one of Lashkar's most wanted militants, identified as Saifullah Bilal, security officials said.

Bilal, said to be the head of the group's operations in the North West Frontier Province, near the Afghan border, was married to one of the sisters, but it was not clear which one, they said.

The other militant said to have wedded one of the women, identified as alleged key suicide attack planner Asif Choto, was still at large, police said.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is regarded as the fiercest of Pakistan's Sunni extremist groups and was banned by President Pervez Musharraf in August 2000. Police say they suspect the group was behind a suicide bombing on a Muslim shrine in Islamabad on May 27 which killed 21 people, most of them Shiites, and an attack on a Shiite mosque in Karachi three days later in which five died.

The Karachi attack also sparked riots by Shiite youths who burned down an outlet of US fast food chain KFC, killing six of the company's employees.

A letter purportedly written by Asif Choto was found by police on one of the attackers who was injured in the May 30 mosque attack and later arrested. Police first drew attention to the two women in July 2004 when security forces were placed on high alert and told to look out for the pair.