KARACHI: Counter-terrorist police in Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi said on Monday they had arrested two suspected Daesh fighters, reportedly trained in Afghanistan and linked to a deceased militant responsible for some of the deadliest bomb attacks in southern Sindh province.
An official at Karachi’s counter-terrorism department (CTD) said they had detained Naseemullah, alias Naseem, and Muhammad Essa alias Molvi Idrees alias Hakeem Lucman in a joint operation on Sunday night.
“Both the terrorists are associated with Daesh and have got their military training from the Bramcha area of Afghanistan,” Mazhar Mashwani, a CTD official, told Arab News without providing further details. The CTD statement added that they were experts at bomb-making.
“Naseem is married to the daughter of Daesh’s deceased terrorist Hafeez Pandarni whereas Essa is the son in law of Muhammad Sedique, another militant of the Daesh,” the statement said.
Pandrani was accused of carrying out the 2017 bomb blasts on shrines and religious places of minority sects in Sindh and Balochistan provinces. He was named by the CTD as one of the three prominent “terrorists” from Sindh province in 2017 and killed in February two years later during a counter-terror operation in Sindh’s Shikarpur District.
“Pandrani had been part of the sectarian organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and later joined Daesh,” Mashwani said.
He added that one of Pandrani’s brothers was killed in Afghanistan, while another died in a suicide attack in Shikarpur.
“But his family has been active and planning attacks. So, from this point of view, the arrests are very important and a blow to the terrorist outfit in Sindh,” Mashwani said.
