KARACHI, Sept 12: High-ranking police officials said on Thursday that they are in the dark about the progress in the Wednesday’s encounter case as those who have been arrested following the encounter are not in police custody.

The Capital City Police Officer, Asad Jehangir, said he had no idea what happened to those who had been arrested on Wednesday. “They are not in police custody,” he said, adding that a submachine gun, a few pistols and many hand- grenades had been found with the suspects.

Answering a question, he said no religious political literature had been found with the suspects. “Contrary to what people are saying, no laptop or any other kind of computer was found with the suspects,” he explained.

Police did not divulge the identities of the two dead suspects, even after postmortems on their bodies were carried out on late Wednesday night.

Sources at Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre said one of the dead men had Central Asian and the other Arab features, but autopsies on their bodies were performed as unknown persons.

There were multiple bullet injuries on their bodes inflicted from long-range shooting, the sources said.

The two dead bodies have been kept in the Edhi’s morgue at Sohrab goth under strict police guard. Two armoured personal carriers and police mobiles were seen guarding the morgue on Thursday.

Police also drew a blank about the whereabouts of the barefoot woman carrying a child. She was taken into custody and whisked away in a police jeep by plainclothes men.

However, sources identified her as Gul Bibi, who was living in the third floor apartment of the 63-C building, where the encounter took place, with her husband and a small daughter.

The sources said the couple had been included in the investigations, and they were accomplices of the other five suspects.

Initially it was thought that the woman and a girl were made hostage, but later it came to light that they belonged to the same group, the sources added.

The five suspects were simply charged under section 324/353 of PPC at Defence police station, but no case of recovery of arms and ammunition and grenades had been registered against them which came under the anti-terrorism laws, the sources said.

The sources said police had sealed the FIR as the suspects had been named in the FIR.

The building 63-C remained sealed on Thursday.

In what sources termed a related development, police raided on Thursday a house in a shanty town in Gulistan-i-Jauhar and arrested a woman. Police dug up the ground in the house and recovered three AK-47 rifles, two SMGs, one repeater guns, two hand-grenades and one carbine.

Sources said on Thursday night that intelligence agencies picked up more than 15 persons in different parts of Gulshan-i-Iqbal and Ferozabad.

Those taken into custody included some foreigners along with locals, the sources said.

Meanwhile, police were probing links between the murder of Daniel Pearl and suspected Al Qaeda militants killed on Wednesday, an investigator said on Thursday, AFP adds.

“There is suspicion that one of the dead suspects is linked with Pearl’s murder,” senior police officer Fayyaz Leghari said.

“It could be possible that one of the dead suspects had links with the murder of Daniel Pearl,” another police investigator said.

“There is little doubt that they are Al Qaeda people,” an intelligence officer told AFP.