NYT : Afghans See Link to Qaeda in Plot to Shoot Karzai

Afghans See Link to Qaeda in Plot to Shoot Karzai

By CARLOTTA GALL and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA | May 1, 2008

KABUL, Afghanistan — The attempt to kill President Hamid Karzai on Sunday was the work of militants who had infiltrated Afghanistan’s security forces and had ties to groups linked to Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the Afghan intelligence chief said Wednesday.

The claims emerged after a day of heightened alarm in which Afghan security forces killed and captured a number of suspects involved in Sunday’s assassination attempt, raiding three safe houses in Kabul, the capital. An eight-hour siege with one cell left seven people dead, including a child and three security officials.

One of those killed was a militant named Homayoun, who assisted in the attack on President Karzai as well as in the bombing in January of the Serena Hotel in Kabul, killing seven people, Amrullah Saleh, the intelligence chief, said at a news conference.

Afghan intelligence officials say they have linked Homayoun through an intermediary to Jalaluddin Haqqani, a mujahedeen commander who is based in Pakistan’s tribal areas and has long had ties to Al Qaeda.

The statements by Afghan officials suggested that militants linked to Al Qaeda and based in Pakistan were working closely with the Taliban to threaten the Karzai government, bringing a new level of sophistication to attacks in and around the capital.

American counterterrorism officials in Washington, however, said it was not yet clear what role, if any, Al Qaeda might have played in the attack against President Karzai on Sunday, even while acknowledging Mr. Haqqani’s past links to the group.

Afghan and Western intelligence officials have warned for more than a year that Taliban and Qaeda militants were using their sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas to fortify their links, recruit new fighters and expand their ranks of suicide bombers.

The tightening alliance has been felt not only here, but also in Pakistan, where militants linked to Al Qaeda have carried out scores of suicide attacks over the past year, and have pushed Pakistan’s new government into fresh talks aimed at a truce. It has also alarmed American and Western officials who report a rise in cross-border attacks from Pakistan in Afghanistan this year.

“Once again our country was attacked from Pakistani soil,” Mr. Saleh, the chief of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, said at a joint news conference with the defense and interior ministers. “This is clear like the sun, and we have all the evidence to show that.” That evidence included cellphone calls from the militants to Pakistan up until their final moments, he said.

The unraveling of the plot here, the officials said, came after the Interior Ministry arrested some of its own men, who had been under investigation since the Serena Hotel bombing.

One of them confessed to involvement in the attack on a military parade on Sunday, which killed three and wounded 11, and he gave information on other groups in Kabul who were planning more attacks, Mr. Saleh and other officials said.

The ministry informant confessed to receiving money in return for weapons for the group and providing cover for them through his job. A second suspect also confessed to supplying the weapons for the attacks, Mr. Saleh said.

Members of the police and a high-ranking officer of the Defense Ministry are also accused of helping the group, according to a member of the intelligence service who did not want to be identified because he is not permitted to speak to the press.

Mr. Saleh called the men traitors and said more would be revealed about them after a full report was delivered to the president. Both the interior minister and defense minister admitted that the security services had been infiltrated.

“From the investigation so far it has become clear that the enemy to some limit infiltrated our security forces,” Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak said. “Those who were involved have also been arrested.”

Within an hour of the confessions, the security forces had narrowed their search to a single house in the Kabul neighborhood of Guzargah and surrounded it on Wednesday, Mr. Saleh said.

When security officials tried to enter, they came under fire from gunmen and a woman barricaded in the basement. Three intelligence officials were killed in the ensuing battle. The security forces finally set off explosives, which killed all those inside — two men, a woman and a child — Mr. Saleh said.

In addition to the militant Homayoun, the two other adults killed in the house were a married couple and were not Afghan, Mr. Saleh said. He said he suspected that the child would have also been used in a suicide attack they were planning in Kabul. The group had been armed with guns, rocket-propelled grenades, mines and suicide vests, he said.

Six others suspects were arrested in a village on the eastern edge of the capital, he said, adding that another raid in a suburb of eastern Kabul was under way.

Interior Minister Zarar Ahmad Muqbil said that his ministry had been watching a group of police officers suspected of involvement in the attack on the Serena Hotel and that they had been arrested. Mr. Saleh said none of the suspects arrested were from the intelligence service.

The group members killed inside the house had been in telephone contact with people in Miram Shah, the capital of North Waziristan, as well as Bajaur, another tribal region of Pakistan, and with people in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. They were using Pakistani subscriber identity module cards in their cellphones, Mr. Saleh said.

“Some contacts were made back and forth, and we have some evidence that they were receiving orders from the other side of the border until the last moments,” he said. “Whether these orders were given through the government of Pakistan, we have no evidence,” he added.

On Monday, Mr. Saleh told Parliament that the group of three gunmen who fired on the parade just as Mr. Karzai was preparing to speak had also been in contact with a central base through text messages, and that they were being urged to carry out their task.

Earlier this year after the attack on the Serena Hotel, Afghan government officials said that the mastermind, Homayoun, was receiving orders from a militant based in Pakistan’s tribal region of North Waziristan.

In particular, they named Mullah Abdullah, who they said had ordered the Serena attack, and who is a senior lieutenant of Mr. Haqqani, the mujahedeen commander, who is based in Pakistan’s tribal region of North Waziristan.

Western military officials in the region have confirmed that the little-known Mullah Abdullah has links to Al Qaeda and ordered suicide attacks in Afghanistan from his base in North Waziristan.

After the attack on the Serena Hotel, Homayoun escaped to Pakistan and called his wife from there the next morning, said one senior Afghan government official, who asked not to be named. The call was monitored by Afghan officials, and his telephone number was passed on to counterparts in Pakistan’s intelligence service, but without result, the official said.

The attack on the Serena Hotel, mounted by a two-man team wearing police uniforms, was a new development in Afghanistan in its sophistication and planning, and it was probably not the work of the Taliban, but more likely an operation by militants linked to Al Qaeda, Afghan and Western officials have said.

The first attacker, a suicide bomber, blew himself up at the gate, killing or wounding the security guards and opening the way for the second attacker. He then entered the hotel and shot and killed people in the lobby and the hotel gym before hiding his weapons and trying to walk out with the hotel employees.

He was caught inside the hotel, and intelligence officials were able to trace the plot back to Mullah Abdullah, partly through 14 phone calls he made to Pakistan in the minutes before his capture, and through his own confession, Afghan officials say.

Pakistani military and government officials have denied that they have any knowledge of Mullah Abdullah or that the Serena attack was planned in Pakistan.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.