KOHAT, May 10: Masood Sharif Khattak, a former director-general of the Intelligence Bureau, has said that the Karachi blast and the deteriorating law and order situation is a proof that the intelligence network has collapsed and that there has been a lack of coordination among law enforcement agencies.

Talking to this correspondent here on Friday, Mr Sharif said that Karachi was the nerve centre of the country hence a main target of terrorists and enemies of the country.

He claimed that when he was the IB chief he had prepared a plan for solving the problem once and for all but the other intelligence agencies which had their own political and vested interest, abandoned it later. He said the intelligence agencies in coordination with the police had identified terrorists who were either killed in police encounters or arrested as a result of which complete calm prevailed in Karachi.

He advised the government to admit that its intelligence had miserably failed. He said that by targeting Karachi the enemy wanted to weaken the nation economically and make the environment unfriendly for foreign investors. Therefore, he said, the president should announce drastic measures to improve the intelligence network.

Meanwhile, the intelligence agencies have extended the scope of investigation to the tribal territory after finding substantial and circumstantial resemblance to the explosion that occurred in Peshawar in 1995 in which 106 people were killed, well-placed military sources confided to Dawn on Thursday.

They said that like Karachi’s incident, in the Peshawar blast a Toyota Corolla of 1974 model was used while the explosives’ quantity and type were also the same. The bomb used in the blast is called C4 and C3 which is a white jelly-like substance mostly smuggled from the United States, Russia and the Central Asian states.

Like Karachi, the place selected for the blast in Peshawar was also of prime importance. The blast occurred in front of a famous cloth centre in the busy Saddar area where only elite of the city go for shopping. In the blast, the daughter of the then governor, Lt-Gen Khursheed Ali Khan, had also died with her two children.

The agencies have been asked to keep a strict vigil on the movement of pro-Taliban Afghans residing in major cities as well as the local outfits that have strong links with them.