GEO 436 ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tuesday vowed full cooperation on US enquiries into a Pakistani-American held over an attempted bombing in New York, throwing the spotlight back onto international terror plots in the country. US officials said Faisal Shahzad, a naturalised US citizen born in Pakistan, was arrested for allegedly driving a car bomb into Times Square that narrowly failed to explode on Saturday night. News reports said Shahzad, 30, lived in Connecticut and returned recently from a five-month trip to Pakistan, including Peshawar, a known transit point for Al-Qaeda and Taliban recruits near the Afghan border. US police arrested Shahzad as he was trying to flee to Dubai on Emirates flight EK202, with reports that Pakistan was his likely final destination. Attorney General Eric Holder said additional evidence had been gathered and investigators were seeking information on “overseas” terrorist groups. In Islamabad, the Pakistani government, which is dependent on US assistance as it battles Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants blamed for bombings that have killed thousands, was quick to pledge assistance. “Pakistan and the US have ongoing, robust cooperation on counter-terrorism. If required, we will extend the fullest cooperation to the US,” foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit told a foreign news agency. One official confirmed there had been “initial discussion” on Shahzad at talks between US ambassador to Islamabad Anne Patterson and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi but declined to reveal further details. Pakistan’’s Taliban, the country’’s premier national security threat which experts see as increasingly close to Al-Qaeda, has been the only group to claim responsibility for the attempted bombing. Its leader, Hakimullah Mehsud — threatened to attack US cities with suicide bombers, seemingly back from the dead in videos that emerged two days after the attempted bombing. “The time is very near when our fedayeen will attack the American states in the major cities,” said Mehsud, in the video released by monitoring groups. It was his first apparent appearance since US officials believed he was likely killed in a US drone strike in northwestern Pakistan on January 14.
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