October 25, 2002	Friday	Sha’aban 18,1423

NEW YORK, Oct 24: The police on Thursday arrested two suspects in connection with the sniper case, terrorizing the greater Washington area for last three weeks.

They dismissed speculations that the suspects were connected to the Al Qaeda network.

The two men were arrested by the police at a highway rest stop in rural Maryland early Thursday morning, in the first big break in a hunt for culprits in 10 sniper slayings which have traumatized the suburbs around the US capital.

Media and government sources identified one of the men as former US soldier John Allen Mohammad, a Gulf War veteran. Reports said the other was John Lee Malvo, Mohammad’s 17-year-old step-son.

“We got our guys,” one investigator was quoted as saying by NBC-TV. The TV station said the men “are considered suspects, according to our sources.”

However, a spokesman for Montgomery County, Maryland, told reporters that it was too soon to tie the pair definitively to the sniper killings. “People are jumping ahead. Give us time to do our job,” he said, adding that the two were being questioned in Rockville, Maryland, headquarters of the sniper task force.

A US government source told news agencies that Mohammad served more than a decade in the armed services and was an army mechanic in a combat support unit.

“He was not a member of the elite ranger battalion at Fort Lewis (near Tacoma, Washington State) and would not have received any sniper training such as that given to special forces troops,” the government sources said.

President Bush was told that federal authorities were reasonably sure the case had been solved, a senior administration official told the Associated Press.

The arrests occurred hours after authorities descended on a home in Tacoma, Washington, believed to hold clues important to the investigation. They then issued a nationwide alert for the car, spotted by a motorist and an attendant at the rest stop.