Pakistan Links to Kabul Raid Probed

[tekisui]

Source: Al Jazeera

Afghan intelligence officers are investigating links between Pakistan and Taliban fighters who launched a series of attacks on government buildings in Kabul which left 20 civilians dead.

The probe launched on Thursday by the National Directorate of Security came a day after the co-ordinated attacks in the Afghan capital.

"As they were entering the ministry of justice before starting their indiscriminate killing of the civilians in there, they sent three messages to Pakistan calling for the blessing of their mastermind," Amrullah Saleh, an Afghan intelligence chief, said.

The three raids on two ministries and a prisons department office were a new tactic by the Taliban, who have previously only attacked a single target at a time.

'Mumbai link'

"These suicide bombers were not the ordinary Taliban type of suicide bombers who come and blow themselves up somewhere," Haroun Mir, a political analyst and co-founder of the Afghanistan Centre for Research and Policy Studies, told Reuters news agency.

"They had rifles as well and their aim was not to immediately explode themselves.

"It was, in my opinion, to take hostages and continue the way they did in Mumbai, to paralyse Kabul and hopefully inflict a big blow to Holbrooke's trip to Afghanistan. This trip is a very important trip to Afghanistan."

Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, has ordered security forces to "act quickly" against those who attacked the country's justice and education ministries and the prisons directorate.

more: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/02/2009212113441587556.html