Most wanted criminal Basra in custody

A Pakistani sectarian terrorism mastermind blamed for hundreds of murders in the country over the past several years has been arrested, security sources said yesterday.

Riaz Basra, 40, was caught last month when he slipped back across the border from Afghanistan where he had lived under the protection of the Taliban and plotted assassinations in Pakistan by his hit men, the sources said.

He is under interrogation at a detention centre in the province of Punjab, they said.

Basra had led the underground sectarian outfit, Lashkar-e-Jhangi, named after Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, an extremist religious leader slain in 1990.

Sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing of an Iranian diplomat in 1990, Basra escaped from jail in 1994 and later fled to Afghanistan, where he was given a safe haven by the Taliban regime.

Pakistan had sought but failed to obtain the extradition of Basra and dozens of his companions during the six-year rule of the Taliban regime, which was wiped out after the U.S. launched military operations in Afghanistan last October.

"The arrest of Basra and many of his colleagues is a major success in stamping out sectarian terrorism," a security official said.

In August last year, President Pervez Musharraf outlawed Lashkar-e-Jhangvi as well as another militant group, Sipah-e-Mohammed.

According to police estimates, around 3,000 people were killed in Pakistan in the decade of the 1990s in tit-for-tat attacks on places of worship and in targeted shootings. About 400 sectarian killings occurred last year.

The ouster of the Taliban enabled President Musharraf to carry forward effectively a reform agenda to control religious and sectarian extremism he had announced after coming to power in a military coup more than two years ago.

Pro-Taliban radical parties and extremist groups in Pakistan had bitterly opposed Musharraf and vowed to topple him after he led Pakistan into the U.S.-led international coalition in September and gave American military access to four bases.

After the collapse of the Taliban and amid a crisis with rival and neighbour, India, triggered by the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, Musharraf on January 12 cracked down hard on sectarianism, terrorism and extremism.

He banned five militant outfits, including two blamed by India for carrying out the parliament attack.

The president also launched measures to regulate and reform thousands of religious schools widely considered to be breeding ground for extremism.

Pakistan has also arrested around 300 members of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaida terror network after they sneaked into the country from Afghanistan, fleeing ferocious American bombings and ground operations.

Security sources say most of the arrested Al Qaida members, largely Arabs of different nationalities, are being held in a high-security prison in Kohat in the country's North-West Frontier Province.