Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Frontline Pakistan
December 2003 plot to assassinate Musharraf. The plan was apparently
conceived by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Amjad Hussain Farooqi,
the two main characters who figured in the December 1999 hijacking
of an Indian Airlines plane.
Sheikh apparently never went back to Britain after his release
in Kandahar and instead joined his mentor, Azhar. Sheikh had
established links with al-Qaeda soon after his release, and Pakistani
intelligence agencies believe he had travelled to Afghanistan several
times since then. The 28-year-old Londoner was believed to have met
with bin Laden during his last trip to Afghanistan at the time of the US
invasion. Just after the Taliban were ousted, he returned to Pakistan,
having shaved his beard to escape capture. 42 He was furious with his
former patrons for helping the American forces in the invasion of a
Muslim country. Only a few weeks later, he was arrested for his role
in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel
Pearl. 43
Farooqi was a close associate of Sheikh’s and the main coordinator
of the group that met in Islamabad in 2001 to plot Musharraf’s murder.
The militants made several plans, but the two most serious ones, which
were carried out within a span of two weeks in December 2003, had
nearly succeeded. The plot revealed the nature of the terrorist coalition
that had emerged in Pakistan after 9/11. Farooqi represented just one
more link in this new alliance, confirming the worst fears about al-
Qaeda’s successful merger with Islamic extremists in Pakistan, one
that made them difficult to identify and segregate.
In his mid thirties, Farooqi had fought against Soviet forces in
Afghanistan and during Taliban rule he ran a guerrilla training camp
in Afghanistan for Pakistani militants. A former activist of HuM, he
had joined Azhar and served as his bodyguard, developing close ties
with al-Qaeda through Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden’s chief of
operations. Farooqi was the key suspect in almost every terrorist attack
in Pakistan after 9/11. One of the country’s most wanted terrorists, he
had a half-million-dollar price on his head. He was killed in a firefight
with security forces in southern Pakistan in September 2004. 44
One of the suicide bombers involved in the Christmas Day attack on
Musharraf was a young Islamic militant who had recently been freed
from an Afghan prison. Twenty-three-year-old Muhammad Jamil had
fought in Kashmir before moving to Afghanistan where he received
guerrilla training at an al-Qaeda camp in Rishkor, south-east of Kabul.
The sprawling compound, which now houses the Afghan army,