HYDERABAD, Jan 17: Security agencies are still interrogating three young men from Swabi and have not yet ruled out the possibility that they might be potential suicide bombers.

Although there is no evidence to link them with terrorism, law-enforcement officials are reluctant to let them go before the Ashura.

Officials said that they wanted to make sure the three men were neither suicide bombers themselves nor linked with a suicide squad.

Sources associated with the interrogation told Dawn on Thursday that the three men were aged between 18 to 21 years and identified them as Fahad Ameen, Faisal and Nabeel Ishtiaque. Fahad and Faisal are from Panj Pao tehsil while Nabeel is a resident of Sama Khel Kotha tehsil in Swabi.

Dawn learnt that security personnel had picked up the three men after they learnt they did not posses computerised national identity cards (CNICs), had four cellphones and 11 Sims. “Most disturbingly, their cellphones contained a downloaded movie clip of a bomb explosion, said to have taken place in Iraq,” the sources said.

When the interrogators confronted the suspects about the movie clip, they said that it was “not unusual for people from the NWFP to keep such clips in cellphones”. However, the police did not believe them.

The father of one of the suspects, Nabeel, arrived in the city and told the police that his son had left his home after a domestic dispute and that he belonged to a well-off family that owned several filling stations. Police have obtained his identity card for verification.

He said that some of Nabeel’s friend had alerted him about his presence in Karachi and that was why he had stopped over in Hyderabad.

“Nabeel told us that one of the detainees was his relative and the other one was his friend and they had come here for recreation,” police sources said.

They had about Rs1,200 and were driving a car they had rented locally. They had visited several guest houses in Hussainabad but could not get a room because they could not produce identity cards.

Officials of the GOR police station had picked them up from a hotel in limits of the Cantonment police station.

“We have strictly warned hotel owners against providing room to people without CNICs. The room from which they had been picked up was obtained for a mere Rs1,300,” he said.

HIGH ALERT: Meanwhile, police remained on high alert after learning about the arrival of Niaz Pathan, who could be part of a terror plot in the city, intelligence report suggested. Police officials said that Niaz Pathan was a resident of Peshawar.