More than a dozen Pakistani Air Force personnel executed two assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf in league with the Al Qaeda, a media report said on Friday.
A day after Musharraf said on television that several low-ranking Army and Air Force officers had taken part in the assassination attempts conceived by an Al Qaeda foreigner and masterminded by a Pakistani, the report said Air Force technicians planted powerful C4 explosives on a bridge and blew it up as Musharraf's car drove over it on December 14.
Musharraf escaped death by a matter of seconds, only to be targeted in a second attempt on Christmas Day, this time by two suicide bombers who rammed explosives-laden trucks into his motorcade.
"We can say that the first attempt was a near exclusive job of more than a dozen Pakistan Air force brainwashed technicians who lived nearby in a PAF residential facility," an official was quoted as saying by the daily.
The PAF technicians were directed, motivated and armed by the Pakistani contact person of the Al Qaeda, he told 'The News' daily.
The military investigation of the two successive attempts on Musharraf's life was headed by Lt Gen Ashfaq Kiyani, who had marshalled dozens of military investigators for about four months until the president was informed about the completion of the probe and identification of all suspects last month.
During the investigation, that took military investigators to five Punjab towns, Karachi, Peshawar and tribal areas, about 150 suspects, including about four dozen PAF and Pakistan Army non-commissioned personnel, were questioned.
Official sources familiar with the probe said a nationwide hunt was on to track Amjad Farooqi, a key accused in the kidnapping and murder case of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
His connections, sources said, have been traced to Shafiq and Jamil Ahmad, the two suicide bombers in the second assassination attempt against the president, the daily said. The report added that Farooqi was also an alleged mastermind behind the suicide car bomb attack at the US consulate in Karachi in June 2002.
The probe, sources told the daily, showed big administrative holes in Pakistan Forces' security apparatus that before the latest investigation, kept no record on the movement of its personnel to and from its official residential facilities after office hours.
The Air Intelligence, intelligence wing of the PAF had no wind that its personnel -- about two dozen at the Chaklala air base -- had been attending meetings with religious extremists and in the first week of December were making active preparations at the Air Force base to bomb the presidential motorcade, the daily said.
The probe has led to the arrest of the religious militants, including three clerics involved in the indoctrination of the PAF technicians and planning of the attacks.
A small group of religious militants who had stored and supplied the C4 explosives to the Air Force technicians and the suicide bombers have also been arrested. The investigation also traced the origin of this particular consignment of the C4 to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The military probe also discovered glaring loopholes in the president's security arrangements on December 14 and 25.
"Air Force officials spent two days making several trips beneath the Lai bridge to strap large quantities of the C4 explosives to the pillars of the bridge," an official said, referring to a bridge Musharraf drove over as he returned from the Chaklala air force base to his official residence in Rawalpindi.
A separate group of attackers, unknown to the airforce personnel, were used in the December 25 double suicide attack, the report said. The second group was directed by the same Pakistani mastermind.
"It was a compartmentalised operation and the PAF technicians had no idea about the suicide attack that followed their failed bid to blow up the president's car over the Lai Bridge," an official told the daily.
The investigation found that the two suicide car bombers were getting live information on the president's movements through a police official.
The probe also found that a few Pakistani Army officials had clues about the operation but they failed to report the suspicious activities to their seniors.
Musharraf yesterday told the local Geo Television channel that investigators had identified the "very clever" Pakistani mastermind and were hunting him.