Prevez Musharraf

Islamabad, May 28 (Reuters): An al Qaida-linked Pakistani wanted in the murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl was behind two attempts to kill President Pervez Musharraf in December, intelligence officials said today.

Musharraf, a key ally in the US-led war on terror, was unharmed in the attempts on his life on December 14 and December 25, but 15 people died in the latter attack, including two suicide bombers.

Intelligence officials said investigators had linked the attacks to Amjad Farooqi, a key suspect in the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Farooqi, still at large, is also the alleged mastermind of a bloody suicide bombing of the US consulate in Karachi in 2002.

Today’s edition of the Pakistani newspaper The News quoted security officials as saying Farooqi had had direct contact with al Qaida’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks arrested in a Pakistani army major’s house in Rawalpindi last year.

It said he had trained two dozen Air Force technicians from the Chaklala Air Force base in Rawalpindi who were involved in the first attempt on Musharraf and recruited the two suicide bombers who carried out the second attack.

The News quoted unnamed sources as saying that the technicians spent two days strapping large quantities of C4 plastic explosive to pillars of a road bridge in the city of Rawalpindi near Islamabad before the December 14 attack.

They were not noticed by police or military intelligence officials who were supposed to keep an eye on the routing of Musharraf's motorcade and the bomb exploded moments after the President’s car passed over the bridge.

Investigators traced the origin of the explosives to al Qaida in Afghanistan, The News said.

The report emerged after Musharraf said in a television interview on Wednesday that junior-rank army and air force personnel were directly involved in the first attempt on his life and would soon be tried by a military court. The News said the plotters used suicide bombers in the December 25 attack after learning that Musharraf’s car was fitted with jamming devices to block remote detonation.

It said the bombers got information on the route of Musharraf's motorcade from a police station in Rawalpindi and help from a staff member at Rawalpindi prison.

“Amjad Farooqi, alias Imtiaz Farooqi, alias Haider, alias Mansoor Hussain is now the most wanted man in Pakistan,” the paper quoted an official as saying. “We need to catch him to break the back of al Qaida and terrorism in Pakistan.”

Police and intelligence agencies narrowly missed catching Farooqi in the cities of Karachi, Faisalabad and Quetta in recent weeks, The News said.

An intelligence official said Farooqi had been spotted in Lahore in the second week of May. He said several raids were conducted but had failed to catch him. Officials say Farooqi is a friend of the British-born militant Sheikh Omar sentenced to death for Pearl’s murder.

Officials say he once served as a bodyguard to Maulana Azhar Masood, a militant linked to a suicide attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001.