MULTAN, May 13: An anti-terrorism court remanded two alleged activists of the outlawed outfit Lashkar-i-Jhangvi in police custody for four days. Police produced Khwaja Ibrahim and Amer Shahzad before the ATC No 1 on Friday.

They told the court that they had sympathies with the religious outfit but they had never been involved in terrorist acts.

Police reportedly presented some record for examination before the court to support their claim that the accused knew a lot that could help break network of the sectarian organizations in the country.

Police claimed that they had to recover arms and ammunitions from the accused.

The Multan DPO had announced the arrest of the two men at a press conference on Thursday. The DPO had claimed that Ibrahim, 65, and Amer, 18, were involved in the attack on an imambargah in Sialkot and a Shia mosque in the Mochi Gate area of Lahore in October last.

The DPO had also claimed that the arrested men had a plan to attack the parliament building in Islamabad to take the MPs hostage to release their incarcerated comrades. Khwaja Ibrahim once even managed to get an entry pass to the press gallery of the National Assembly in order to assess how they could execute their plan, he added.

Amer was said to be accompanying the suicide bombers who attacked the imambargah in Sialkot and the mosque in Lahore while he had planned to execute a suicide attack on Allama Sajid Naqvi during an MMA rally in Multan on December 5 last. The Allama, however, did not turn up to address the rally.

Police said they got a clue to the Lashkar’s present network of activists during interrogation of two accused, Haji Sadiq and Bilal Laang, arrested in a failed dacoity in November last year from Shujabad. A shootout took place when five gunmen attempted to rob the staff of a ginning factory carrying Rs5 million in cash. A guard and a driver of the factory and an assailant wearing the police uniform had died in the shootout.

Sadiq and Bilal had reportedly told police that they worked to generate funds and if they had succeeded in their bid, they would have handed over the cash to Khwaja Ibrahim and Amer for the execution of various terrorist acts.