KARACHI, June 7: Police on Tuesday announced the arrest of two suspected militants of a banned organization, claiming they were involved in the suicide bomb attack on a city mosque on May 30. The police also claimed having recovered five kilograms of explosive material, four dynamite sticks, a grenade and two TT pistols from the suspects’ possession.

DSP Fayyaz of the CID said: “We achieved a major breakthrough in (inquiry into) the suicide attack on the Madinatul Ilm mosque. We raided a place near Kamran Chowrangi in Gulistan-i-Jauhar and picked up two militants of the banned Lashkar-i-Jhangvi group.”

The militants were identified as Qari Bilal Farooqui and Mufti Altaf alias Mufti Shahid.

The DSP said that Asif Chhotu, who heads Lashkar’s militant wing in Karachi, had instigated Mufti Altaf to carry out the suicide attack but Mufti backed out at the 11th hour. Chhotu then brought another militant who carried out the attack.

The DSP claimed that Mufti Altaf was involved in the attack on an imambargah in Sailkot a year back. He said Mufti had been assigned the task of exploding himself after a first blast in the Sialkot imambargah but he fled the scene. He said that Bilal was also persuaded to carry out the suicide attack, but he too refused at the last hour.

Bilal has joined the Chhotu group recently and is not involved in any major criminal act, according to the investigation.

According to the DSP, the suspects could not identify the man who had actually blown himself up in the mosque, but they do know that he was a resident of the Sohrab Goth area and ran a tailoring shop.

The DSP said the arrest had been made on a tip-off, adding that the wounded suspect in custody, Tehseen, had not helped police in this respect. “We showed him (Tehseen) the photographs of Bilal and Mufti Altaf and he identified them as members of his group,” he said.

Sources in the police department, however, claimed that Mufti Altaf had been picked up some three months back from a house in New Karachi. During interrogation, Mufti provided information about Bilal Farooqui who was then picked up from a house in Shanti Nagar in Gulshan-i-Iqbal about 15 days after Mufti’s arrest.

The sources said the two suspects had undergone intense interrogation during the past two months and had been handed over to the CID police only on Monday night.