Four members of an al-Qaeda-linked militant group in Pakistan are being questioned by US officials over possible ties to Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad, Pakistani authorities said today.
Law enforcement officials from both countries have joined forces to try and pinpoint Shahzad’s actions and whom he met in Pakistan on his final trip to his native country last year before Saturday’s botched bombing.
Two Pakistani security officials told The Associated Press that four members of the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group are being questioned over possible links to Shahzad.
They said US law enforcement officials, as well as Pakistani ones, had been given access to the men.
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The ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee told CNN today that there “is a strong link” between Shahzad and the Taliban in Pakistan.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) told “American Morning” that he has drawn that conclusion from a number of sources.
“We’re going to get much more aggressive and perhaps more creative in terms of how we gather intelligence to find the plots and find individuals to stop them,” he said.
But the main spokesman for Pakistan’s Taliban said today that the group neither trained nor recruited Shahzad.
“We don’t even know him. We did not train him,” spokesman Azam Tariq told two AFP reporters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Meanwhile, Shahzad received calls from Pakistan on a prepaid cellphone before the attempted bombing, The Post reported today.
Investigators got the cell number from the person who sold Shahzad the SUV used in the plot, and pulled the call history, a source said.
Shahzad, 30, who has waived his right to remain silent and be presented in federal court speedily, has told investigators he received explosives training in his native Pakistan after traveling there last July.
The naturalized American has also told them the car bomb, which did not detonate, was intended to slaughter hundreds of innocent pedestrians in retaliation for US drone attacks that have killed Pakistani Taliban leaders.
Shahzad’s plot failed because he put a non-explosive fertilizer in his homemade weapon of mass destruction, and used the wrong fireworks to ignite the potentially deadly device.
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He bought the incendiaries two months ago from a shop in Matamoros, Pa., whose owner told The Post that Shahzad clearly had no clue what he was doing.
The fireworks — M-88 Silver Salutes — will explode only if they are individually lit, according to Bruce Zoldan, who owns the 55-store Phantom Fireworks chain. But Shahzad bought 152 of them and left them next to canisters of gasoline, propane and bags of fertilizer, thinking they’d all ignite if one were lit.
The plan would have worked had Shahzad gone to the black market for illegal M-80s instead, Zoldan said.
While registering to buy the fireworks in Pennsylvania, Shahzad gave his name in reverse order — “Shahzad Faisal” — to cover his tracks. Surveillance video from the store, which has been turned over to the FBI, clearly shows Shahzad, clad in blue jeans and a green jacket, spending about a half-hour selecting various fireworks.