ISLAMABAD: The arrest of two middle-class Pakistani sisters who allegedly trained to become suicide bombers has removed a major threat to the country amid a renewed wave of sectarian bloodshed, officials said yesterday.

Police had spent a year hunting for the pair of female Islamic militants, who were named as Arifa and Habiba and said by officials to be the well-educated daughters of a bank executive.

Security officials said that while on the run the pair had each married top members of the Sunni extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has links to Al Qaeda and was implicated in the murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl.

“It removes a major threat because such an unusual attack using female suicide bombers would have caused a lot of damage. It would have set an example for others to follow,” said a senior Pakistani official involved in the fight against sectarian terrorism.

The women were arrested as they walked along a road near the northern tourist town of Swat along with one of Lashkar’s most wanted militants, identified as Saifullah Bilal, security officials said.

Bilal, said to be the head of the group’s operations in North West Frontier Province, near the Afghan border, was married to one of the sisters but it was not clear which one, they said.

The other militant said to have wedded one of the women, who was identified as alleged key suicide attack planner Asif Choto, was still at large, police added.

“We have been searching for them for the last one year, and it is a huge relief that they are captured before they could do any damage,” the senior security official added.

Investigators said the sisters were trained by their uncle, Gul Hasan, who was sentenced to death last week for killing 45 people in two suicide attacks on Shia mosques in Karachi in 2004.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is regarded as the fiercest of Pakistan’s Sunni extremist outfits and was banned by President Pervez Musharraf in August 2000.

Police say they suspect the group was behind a suicide bombing on a shrine in Islamabad on May 27 which killed 21 people, most of them Shia, and an attack on a Shia mosque in Karachi three days later in which five died.

The Karachi attack also sparked riots by Shia youths who burned down an outlet of US fast food chain KFC, killing six of the company’s employees.

A letter purportedly written by Asif Choto was found by police on one of the attackers who was injured in the May 30 mosque attack and later arrested.

Police first revealed the existence of the two women in July 2004, when security forces were placed on high alert and told to look out for the pair.

The women’s uncle, Hasan, had admitted training his nieces for a suicide attack on a gathering of Shiite men and women, the police investigator said.

A Pakistani anti-terrorism court on Saturday convicted Hasan on murder charges for his role in the May 2004 attacks in Karachi, which also wounded 127 people.

Thousands of Shias and majority Sunnis have been killed in Pakistan in recent years in bomb blasts, suicide bombings and targeted killings. Last year 160 people were killed. - AFP