ISLAMABAD, April 4: Judicial Magistrate Jehangir Mir on Thursday sent two alleged Iranian terrorists as well as wife and two children of one of them to Adiala jail.

The Iranians were held with hand grenades and pistols near the UNHCR office a day before the terrorist attack on a church in the diplomatic enclave on March 17.

Police said the alleged terrorists, Junaid and Qasim, were dissident Iranians who had been living in Pakistan since 1979.

The police said they had completed interrogation of the accused who, they alleged, also possessed maps of sensitive installations in the capital.

It was suspected that these people had links with some terrorist group and intended to carry out some act of sabotage in the diplomatic area.

Defence counsel Shaukat Mahmood Malik has submitted before the court that his clients had played into the hands of a “terrorist mastermind”, Ali Arbabi. One of the two Iranians had earlier told the interrogators that Mr Arbabi asked them to deliver the grenades to his friends in Islamabad.

The defence counsel claimed that the accused had not gone to the diplomatic area with the intention to carry out a terrorist attack.

Had it been so, the woman and children would not have accompanied them, he argued.—A Reporter