KARACHI: Police in Pakistan said they arrested Monday a suspect linked to the country’s most-wanted militant, Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud – who has a five million dollar US bounty on his head.
‘We have arrested a man called Badshah Deen whom we suspect has links to Baitullah Mehsud,’ Fayyaz Khan, a superintendent in the Karachi police crime investigation department, told AFP.
Mehsud heads the much-feared Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and was accused by the former government of masterminding the 2007 assassination of ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
He claimed responsibility for a deadly assault on a police academy in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore last month and threatened to attack the US capital in retaliation for US drone attacks on militants.
Khan said police arrested Deen during a raid on a house where he was hiding in Karachi’s impoverished area of Sachal, and impounded weapons.
‘Badshah would provide logistic support to militants in Karachi for criminal activities in the city,’ Khan said.
‘He would also send money to the tribal areas,’ he added in reference to the lawless semi-autonomous belt on Pakistan’s western border with Afghanistan where Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters have safe havens.
Police were scouring for Deen accomplices elsewhere in the city, Khan said.
The US State Department has branded Mehsud a ‘key Al-Qaeda facilitator’ in the semi-autonomous South Waziristan tribal area.
