QUETTA, April 16: Police have arrested a suspected member of the Al Qaeda network in the Naal area of the Khuzdar district, 390km southwest of here.

“Yes, we arrested a 25-year-old Iraqi national having no legal travelling documents on Monday,” a senior official of the Khuzdar police, Mohammad Gul, told Dawn on Tuesday night.

The Iraqi national, identified as Shakar bin Abdul Hadi, arrived in Peshawar from Afghanistan a week ago and later came to Quetta by bus.

He went to Khuzdar by road and then to the small town of Naal, some 65km southwest of Khuzdar, where he was arrested by the town police.

During interrogation, he said he was an Iraqi national and had spent a long time in different cities and towns of Afghanistan, including Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar.

“An authority letter of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and a ticket on which he travelled from Peshawar to Quetta was seized from his possession,” the police official said and added that Shakar was young and could speak Persian, Pushto and Arabic fluently.

According to the ticket, Shakar travelled from Peshawar to Quetta on a fake name, Shafiqullah. He also informed the police that he had crossed into Pakistan through an unconventional route.