REUTERS
Pakistani authorities arrested four Daesh terrorists in September 2016 for plotting attacks in the city of Lahore, just weeks after the military declared it had halted the terror group’s expansion into the country.
The four were plotting attacks on government targets when they were seized in a raid along with 1.5 kilograms of explosives, fuses and detonators, according to the city’s Counter Terrorism Department.
“The terrorists had planned to kill officials on a large scale” and were about to attack when agents raided their hideout, the department said. Weeks earlier, Pakistan’s military foiled Daesh’s attempts to establish operations in the country, arresting more than 300 terrorists and sympathizers. The group’s core organizers were among those arrested.
“They tried to make an ingress, and they failed,” military spokesman Lt. Gen. Asim Bajwa told reporters.
Concern has been growing that Daesh might try to migrate into Pakistan. The terror group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a hospital in the Pakistani city of Quetta that killed 74 people. The bombing, however, was also claimed by a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban.
Daesh last year declared Afghanistan and Pakistan as the state of “Khorasan,” part of its self-declared global caliphate, and appointed longtime militant Hafiz Saeed Khan as its regional leader. A drone strike killed Khan in eastern Afghanistan.