French Team to Assess Pakistan Blast Probe
The delegation will arrive in Islamabad before flying to Karachi to meet with police investigators probing the May 8 deadly blast outside the Sheraton Hotel, police investigation Chief Fayyaz Leghari told AFP.
The visit comes after Pakistani police arrested two main suspects, Asif Zaheer and Mohammad Bashir, who have allegedly confessed their involvement in the attack.
Three Pakistanis were also killed when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden Volkswagen Beetle into the bus that regularly picked up the French engineers outside the hotel.
"We will brief the French team about the progress in the case.
We have almost solved it," Leghari said.
No details of the composition of the delegation nor the dates of its visit have been given due to security reasons.
"We have been in touch with them. When we arrested Zaheer, we shared the investigation with them. They too had sent the report about the suicide bomber, whom they believe was not an Arab, but of South Asian origin," he said.
Police believe seven people were involved in the bombing, four are still at large while the seventh was the suicide bomber.
"The suicide bomber has also been identified by the two suspects during the interrogation and he was a Pakistani," Leghari said.
Bashir was remanded in custody by an anti-terrorism court judge until January 25.
Bashir told reporters at a police station on Wednesday that the man who had plowed the car bomb into the French engineers' bus was a 26-year-old Pakistani whom he met on the eve of the attack.
The man, just identified as Rashid, was angry at the killings of Muslims elsewhere in the world, Bashir said.
French experts visited Pakistan soon after the attack and reconstructed the face of the suicide bomber.
The French engineers were assisting Pakistan's Navy in developing its second Agosta 90-B class submarine.
Police are due to submit the charge sheet in the case on January 25.