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US terror listed Pakistani groups down but not out

AFP, Islamabad
Pakistan police have virtually decimated the notorious al-Qaeda-linked militant Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ), listed as a terrorist group last week by the United States, but several followers remain at large.
"Some of them may still be hiding," the head of the interior ministry's Crises Management Cell Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema told AFP.
The gang's hard-core Sunni Muslim militants are linked to al-Qaeda, the murder and abduction of US journalist Daniel Pearl, deadly car bomb attacks in Karachi, and the murders of four US oil workers in Karachi in 1997 and hundreds of Shiite activists. LJ, meaning the "Jhangvi fighters," was declared a foreign terrorist organisation January 30 by US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The gang was formed in 1995 and named after firebrand preacher Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, killed in 1990 allegedly by a rival Shiite militant. It had been outlawed in August 2001
in President Pervez Musharraf's crackdown on Islamic militants that sought to curb sectarian killings.
Cheema said the ban prompted a comprehensive round-up of LJ followers.
"I believe all their top leaders are behind bars," he said. "Our crackdown on them resulted in restoring sectarian harmony."
LJ leader Akram Lahori, one of Pakistan's most wanted militants, was arrested in June, formally charged in the murder of Pakistan State Oil managing director Shoukat Mirza in the late 1990s.
"Since the arrest of Lahori there has been a massive decline in sectarian killings," a senior officer from the police force's anti-terrorist wing, responsible for the arrest of Lahori and most LJ members, told AFP.
Lahori's faction in particular was involved in gunning down 65 doctors in 2001, he added.
Top militant Asif Ramzi, wanted in the Pearl murder, was blown up in December in an apparently accidental explosion in a warehouse.
"Ramzi's death and the arrest of Lahori has almost broken the group's backbone. But there must be several other members who must still be on the run," police investigations chief Fayyaz Leghari told AFP.
Key LJ figures Fazal Karim and Naeem Bokhari have been in custody since May, and according to investigators have confessed to kidnapping and holding Pearl in January last year. Karim said he held Pearl's head while unidentified Arab men killed him.
Police suspect the gang provided al-Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan with shelter and support, and may have teamed up with them to execute terror attacks.
Most LJ activists trained in Afghanistan alongside al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
"Al-Qaeda needed someone here to continue their activities and they looked for people and perhaps found LJ as the best available cadre," Sindh province police chief Syed Kamal Shah told AFP.