Pakistan Says Nine Bomb Attack Suspects Arrested

The suspects were also involved in the killing of the army`s top medical officer and two other attacks.

Pakistani police said on Friday they had arrested nine al Qaeda-linked militants suspected of involvement in bombings including attacks on the Danish embassy and an Italian restaurant in Islamabad last year.

A Turkish woman was killed and several people were wounded, including four FBI agents, in the March attack on the Italian restaurant, a favourite of foreigners in the capital. Six people were killed in a car-bomb attack on the Danish embassy in June.

The suspects, arrested in a raid in the city of Rawalpindi, which adjoins Islamabad, on Thursday, were also involved in the killing of the army's top medical officer, also last year, and two other attacks, said Rawalpindi's police chief.

"They are very dangerous terrorists. They have confessed their involvement in all of these attacks," police chief Rao Mohammad Iqbal told Reuters.

Iqbal said the men, all of them Pakistani, were also planning to attack Pakistan's National Day parade on March 23. Police had recovered 100 kg (220 lb) of explosives as well as detonators from the suspects, he said.

The men were believed to have links with Baituallah Mehsud, Pakistan's top Taliban commander and an al Qaeda ally, he said.

The government said Mehsud was behind the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in a gun and suicide bomb attack in Rawalpindi in December 2007.

An al Qaeda leader, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, in an interview with a Pakistani news channel aired in July last, said the bomber who attacked the Danish embassy had come from the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Separately, police arrested on Thursday three suspected Indian agents planning to attack prominent people and installations, including offices linked to a militant group blamed for November's attacks in Mumbai.

The men, arrested in a village close to the Indian border, were Pakistani, police said.

The arrests came just before as the government was expected to release details of its investigation into the attacks in Mumbai in which 179 people were killed.

India blamed the banned Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group for the attacks and said the plotters must have had support from Pakistani security agencies.

Pakistan, which has a history of using militant groups to further foreign policy objectives, has denied any involvement in the attacks by state agencies and offered to cooperate in the investigation of the Mumbai violence.