March 22, 1995, New York Times, Pakistan Asks for U.S. Help in Crackdown on Militants, by John F. Burns,

March 22, 1995, New York Times, Pakistan Asks for U.S. Help in Crackdown on Militants, by John F. Burns,

Under growing pressure to crack down on Muslim militants suspected of plotting terrorist attacks abroad, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said today that her Government favored closing clandestine training centers in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province but would need help from the United States.

"We in Pakistan simply don't have the resources on our own to carry out the entire cleansing operation," said Ms. Bhutto, who met with American reporters ahead of a two-day visit by Hillary Rodham Clinton that begins this weekend. Prime Minister Bhutto is scheduled to meet with President Clinton in Washington next month.

The Pakistani leader said she would appeal to the United States and to other countries to help her close down suspected bases of Arab and Asian militants, including Muslim religious schools and other organizations that have been used as fronts for terrorist activities.

Questioning of terrorist suspects seized recently in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, has revealed that the suspected mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York made a botched attempt to kill Ms. Bhutto during the 1993 election campaign that returned her to power, Pakistani newspapers reported last weekend.

The suspect, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was captured in a boarding house in Islamabad six weeks ago and was immediately deported to New York.

The newspaper reports quoted unidentified police officials as saying that Mr. Yousef had accidentally detonated a bomb he originally intended to place under a manhole cover near Ms. Bhutto's family home in Karachi in September 1993. The reports said Mr. Yousef was treated for injuries to his hands at the Aga Khan hospital in Karachi and released.

Confirming the reports, Ms. Bhutto said Pakistan had not known the extent of the terrorist underground here or its international links until Mr. Yousef's arrest by American and Pakistani agents in Islamabad on Feb. 7 set off a wider inquiry.

"It was deeply disturbing to Pakistan that somebody who is an international terrorist should have such deep roots within Pakistan, and that he should seek to influence the course of an election," she said.

Ms. Bhutto, who met with the reporters at the Prime Minister's sumptuous residence on a 35-acre estate overlooking Islamabad, said that the police are also looking for an uncle of Mr. Yousef. She did not identify him but said that he had recently disappeared from his position as the director of an Arab assistance organization in Peshawar, one of a cluster of Arab social, educational and relief organizations being investigated for possible terrorist links.

The Prime Minister added that the police had "plenty of photographs" of the man with what Ms. Bhutto described as "higher-ups in Pakistan."

The Pakistani leader said the photographs "could be innocent, or not," and that the police would investigate to determine whether Mr. Yousef's terrorist connections extended to influential people in Pakistan.

There is a growing sense among Pakistanis that those responsible for the widespread lawlessness that has swept the country in recent years -- the drug barons who control the country's pervasive heroin-trafficking, the armed gangs that have run amok in Karachi, and the terrorist underworld in Peshawar -- are protected by a network of influential politicians and businessmen.

Ms. Bhutto hinted that powerful forces are arrayed against the Government when she said that Pakistan could not move on its own against terrorists.

While her Government is prepared to move against "drug barons, militants and terrorists" in a way that previous governments have not, she said, "Pakistan on its own cannot just go and shut down" terrorist training camps, religious schools and other places used as terrorist fronts because doing so would prompt the militants to fan out across Pakistan and step up their campaign of violence.

Ms. Bhutto said her message to the United States would be: "You are a fair nation. You have been our allies. Help us to overcome militancy and terrorism."

In these and other remarks, she appeared to be suggesting that the Clinton Administration should bolster Pakistan's stability by moving to restore aid programs that were worth more than $600 million annually before Washington cut off all economic and military assistance to the country in 1990. The aid was suspended in a dispute over Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

But aides to the Pakistani leader said her call for American help was also a reference to the use of United States influence in persuading other governments, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, to take back their own nationals who have joined terrorist groups here.

Police officials and diplomats have said that the Peshawar underground may have as many as 1,000 members drawn from a wide range of Arab countries, including Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Sudan, as well as from nations in Central Asia and the Far East, including the Philippines.

A series of events has drawn international attention to Pakistan's role as a base for terrorists. On March 8, gunmen in a stolen taxicab shot and killed two Americans who were traveling to work at the American consulate in Karachi. Some suspect that they were killed in revenge for the arrest of Mr. Yousef, who faces a jail term of as much as 240 years if he is convicted in a bombing conspiracy trial in New York. The World Trade Center blast killed 6 people and injured more than 1,000.

Last week Pakistani investigators said that telephone calls Mr. Yousef made from Islamabad to Peshawar in the hours before his arrest had led them to six, and later several more, associates of Mr. Yousef who are being held on suspicion of involvement in an Arab-led terrorist underground in Peshawar and in Quetta, a city in west-central Pakistan that the police say has also been a sanctuary for terrorists.

It was in questioning those suspects, who include at least three Arabs and an Iranian, that Pakistani officials say they learned about the bombing attempt against Ms. Bhutto and of the involvement in the Peshawar underground of several relatives of Mr. Yousef, including two of his brothers who are now on a police watch list.