ISLAMABAD - PAKISTAN said on Monday that the banned Sunni Muslim extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was involved in the deadly September bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, and announced two new arrests.
No one has claimed responsibility for the September 20 attack, which killed at least 60 people and wounded more than 260, but officials had pointed the finger at Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.
The group (LJ) - which is said to have links to Al-Qaeda - is regarded as Pakistan's fiercest Sunni extremist outfit. Former president Pervez Musharraf banned the group in August 2001.
'The entire matter has been solved... Basically it was assisted by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi,' senior interior ministry official Rehman Malik told federal lawmakers in parliament.
Mr Malik said two teenage boys had been arrested in central Punjab province in connection with the attack, which was carried out by a suicide bomber in a dump truck packed with 600 kilogrammes of high explosives.
'The car which was used, the dumper which was used - we have full information,' Mr Malik said, explaining that the truck bomb was prepared in the town of Jhang south of Islamabad and then driven into the capital.
'We have got the details of telephone calls. Two boys who assisted were arrested.' Four men had already been remanded in custody pending trial.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has been blamed for the killings of hundreds of Shiite Muslims since its emergence in the early 1990s.
The group's hitmen found sanctuaries in Afghanistan during the 1996-2001 rule of the hardline Taleban regime, which refused Pakistani demands to hand them over.
After the ouster of the Taleban in a US-led invasion in late 2001, LJ operatives returned to Pakistan and forged alliances with extremist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad, which battles Indian rule in Kashmir, and Al-Qaeda.
Pakistani police linked LJ to the murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl in early 2002, as well as two suicide car bomb attacks on French engineers and the US consulate that same year in the southern port city of Karachi. -- AFP
