Two al Qaeda suspects killed

Pakistani police said they had killed two suspected al Qaeda members and arrested five others after a three-hour shootout yesterday in the southern city of Karachi in which a young girl was wounded in the crossfire.

A police source said the men were thought to be members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, although provincial police chief Syed Kamal Shah declined to comment, describing the men only as "not ordinary criminals".

Police in Karachi had intensified land and aerial patrols yesterday to head off possible attacks on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States, which Washington has blamed on al Qaeda.

Security and intelligence agents raided a three-storey building in an upmarket district of Karachi yesterday morning and arrested two men, but had to call in police support after other people in the building threw a grenade at them.

"There was a shootout which lasted over three hours in which six policemen were injured, one of them seriously," Shah told reporters at the scene.

Witnesses said police had fired teargas and thousands of rounds at the building before the gunmen, armed with Kalashnikovs, grenades and sub-machineguns, finally surrendered.

"Two criminals were killed and we have arrested a total of five criminals," Shah said.

But police retracted an earlier statement that a four-year-old girl had been killed in the crossfire.

"Initially there was information that a child had also been killed, but that information is not correct," they said in a statement.

One officer said the girl had been wounded in the crossfire and had fallen unconscious, only to regain consciousness later at a local hospital.

One detective said the girl lived with her mother in another apartment in the same building, which was newly built and largely unoccupied. The mother and her two-year-old son were unhurt. She was taken into protective police custody as a witness.

One of the arrested men shouted "Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) as he was led away, while another was speaking Arabic, witnesses said. The Kalma, the Muslim declaration of faith, was written in blood on the wall of the apartment's kitchen, a policemen told Reuters.

Police, who had been stationed on the roofs of surrounding buildings, inside apartments and on the roads, fired in the air in celebration as the men were led away, most of the suspects bearded and blindfolded.

One officer said one of the men was an Afghan while two others were Arabs. But Shah refused to say who they were.

"They are not ordinary criminals," he said. "I cannot say who they are or why they were there. Investigations will prove who they are."

The police source said they had recovered a laptop, some CDs and several thick books from the apartment.

A man living in the building opposite said the young men had been living there for some time, but had been away for about a month before returning on Tuesday night.

"We used to see them playing cards," he said. "We don't know their nationalities but some of them appeared to be foreigners."

At least 2,000 policemen have been deployed around diplomatic missions and residences, luxury hotels and offices of foreign companies in Karachi, where three attacks on Western targets in recent months have killed dozens of people.

In the capital Islamabad, diplomats were taking few chances. Both the American and British embassies were closed to the public as a precaution, although officials said they were not aware of any specific threats.

At the US embassy, more than 100 invited guests came to see an exhibition of photographs of the September 11 attacks in New York and their aftermath, and to honour the victims.

"We need to deprive the terrorists of their funding sources and their safe havens," Ambassador Nancy Powell said in a speech. "We also need to deprive them of their breeding grounds by encouraging dialogue and tolerance and by eliminating poverty."

Police said they had recovered three grenades in Islamabad on Tuesday that could possibly have been used for attacks on September 11.

Pakistan has seen a rise in Islamic militancy since President Pervez Musharraf abandoned support for the Taliban rulers in neighbouring Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks and threw his weight behind the US-led war on terror.

The Islamic militants, angered by Islamabad's policy shift, responded with a series of attacks on Christian and Western targets.