Pakistan inches closer to chaos. From AP, :
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistan announced Saturday that it had arrested at least five men suspected of having ties to al Qaeda who’d been plotting to launch suicide attacks on government leaders and the U.S. Embassy.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told reporters that security forces had captured five or six suspects — one Egyptian, the others Pakistani — in the past week across the country, and had seized weapons.
Authorities were hunting for four to five other suspects, he said.
However, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat told The Associated Press that about a dozen suspects had been nabbed. He said they’d been planning suicide attacks on “important personalities.”
Hayyat said the group wanted to hit the official residence of President Pervez Musharraf, Parliament and the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Islamabad, as well as Army House in the neighboring city of Rawalpindi.
They also wanted to target government ministers, he said.
“This is a gang of suicide bombers, and our security agencies have done a remarkable job by foiling this plot,” Hayyat said, adding that those captured were “definitely linked to al Qaeda.”