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ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Pakistani police Friday seized seven rockets and several heavy machine gun shells near Islamabad airport, days after a fruit truck bomb exploded here killing 16 people and wounding nearly 100, officials said. The rockets were found in a bag placed near a bus stand on the airport road, city police chief Nasir Durrani said. "We found this stock due to the day and night vigil" mounted in the country since the blast in Islamabad's fruit and vegetable market on Tuesday, he told AFP. He said the arms cache was meant for some "terrorist activity" but the saboteurs apparently abandoned their plan "due to the high police and security alert." Pakistani military ruler General Pervez Mushrrraf on Thursday said Indian intelligence could be behind the blast that killed 16 people in Islamabad. There are some clues that indicate the involvement of the Indian Intelligence Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) in the explosion, he said. It was part of a "vicious campaign against Pakistan," Musharraf said on state television after visiting the wounded at a local hospital. Senior administration official Hamid Ali Khan said "terrorist activities have increased in the country due to tensions between the Pakistani and Indian troops at the border" in the disputed Kashmir state. "As the winter starts it becomes difficult to capture Pakistani border posts so they have increased terrorist activities in the cities to harass the people and divert the attention of the world from the Kashmir issue," Khan added. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since 1947, two of them over Kashmir, the Himalayan state divided between the two countries and claimed by both. The neighbors routinely accuse rival intelligence networks of carrying out cross-border sabotage and subversion. The official Associated Press of Pakistan on Thursday said an unknown Indian Hindu outfit in a telephone call to the Pakistani mission in New Delhi claimed responsibility for Tuesday's blast. An anonymous caller told the High Commission that his group, the Hindu Sena Rashtriya Sangh Party, was responsible for the blast, the agency said in a report from New Delhi. The caller, who described himself as secretary general of the group, threatened to carry out 50 similar blasts in the future at various places in Pakistan, the report said. |
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