A ‘crude’ attempt to kill president: Blast in park, rockets in capital
By Our Special Correspondent
ISLAMABAD, Oct 11: The rocket blast at the Ayub Park in Rawalpindi last week and the placement of four other 107mm rockets outside the Presidency and on a route that General Musharraf often takes was a crude attempt to assassinate the president.
“The perpetrators were all religious extremists, perhaps linked to a group having contacts with Al Qaeda, but they were not fully trained in carrying out such a task”, President Musharraf said while informally talking to a group of journalists. “And this is also one of the reasons that almost all those involved in placing or detonating the explosives have been rounded up by intelligence agencies”, he said.
While being in an upbeat mood before the start of his press talk at an Iftar dinner, President Musharraf gave some details of what kind of explosive devices had been put into operation, and why they failed. “The attempt was real but the devices were so crude that they were bound to fail.”
He said that in this age of technology, terrorists were also using electronic devices to their advantage. In this particular case, he said, the vibrator mechanism of the mobile phone had been used to activate the battery which, in turn, had been connected to the poorly-placed 107mm rockets. He said they did manage to detonate it in one particular case (perhaps talking about the explosion in Ayub Park, that overlooks his official residence in Rawalpindi), but it failed to go off elsewhere.
Rest of the rockets from the park were seized by the authorities, and during a combing operation the following days they discovered two 107mm rockets from near the President’s House in Islamabad that had been well-fitted through a well-designed circuit with a mobile phone, and then a similar set of explosive device from near the intelligence headquarters near Islamabad’s Aabpara area.
“You see, such circuits can easily detonate an explosive device, including such big rockets”, the president said. “But in the absence of a proper barrel such rockets remain directionless, and can never hit a target”. And, according to him, that is exactly what happened.
Explaining how the intelligence agencies managed to round up the suspects so quickly, General Musharraf said that during investigations they discovered that calls made to the SIMs attached to the three devices had been made from the same phone. One thing led to the other and as it had happened during the investigations into the earlier assassination attempts, all those directly involved in planting the devices were arrested.
Still, General Musharraf admitted that the people who could be categorised as the mastermind and those who were the technical experts like the one who made the circuit for such explosive device still remained at large. As a result, he said, the threat for more such attempts could not be ruled out. The president did not give the exact number of people rounded up, nor did he give their identities or the places from where they had been arrested. The only hint he dropped was that although all those arrested were religious fanatics, having links with some extremist group, they were part of some new gang.
The president acknowledged that he had remained lucky in the wake of a series of attempts on his life . But then he said there could not be any room for complacency as there were many more religious extremists who were willing to carry out such acts, perhaps at the instigation of Al Qaeda or any other group opposed to his policies
