New York bomb investigators hunt for balding, middle-aged white man

CCTV footage show the man taking off one shirt to reveal a red one underneath. He then puts it in a bag.The balding white man in his forties then picks up the bag and moves on

This CCTV footage shows the Nissan Pathfinder (left) which carried the bomb shortly before it was abandoned

 A bomb squad officer examines the Nissan Pathfinder car. Smoke emerging from the vehicle first alerted officers to the 'car bomb'

The alarm clock found in a dark SUV which is said to be in the vehicle with the bomb

 

* Mayor dismisses Pakistan Taliban claim of responsibility
* Similarities with Tiger Tiger bomb outside London nightclub
* Handbag seller alerts police to smoking car
* Police investigate South Park link

The hunt is on in the U.S. for a balding, middle-aged white man who seen taking off his shirt near the car where the New York bomb was found.

Surveillance video shows him slipping down an alley close to Times Square and taking off a shirt, revealing another underneath.

In the same clip, he's seen looking back in the direction of the smoking vehicle and furtively putting the first shirt in a bag.

The images were released as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said detectives had made substantial progress in their investigation and that those involved would eventually be caught.

He added that agents were still looking for the man spotted in the surveillance video taking off his shirt.

'We have some good leads,' said Holder referring to the middle-aged man, adding. 'We are following a number of other leads as well.'
Holder was cautious about linking it to international terrorism and claims of responsibility by the Taliban in Pakistan.

'I know that group in the past has claimed responsibility for incidents that (they) ultimately were not connected to," he said, adding it was too early to say who was in fact responsible.

New York police commissioner Ray Kelly said had the bomb detonated it 'looks like it would have caused a significant fireball'.

The petrol-and-propane bomb was crude but could have sprayed shrapnel and metal parts with enough force to kill pedestrians and knock out windows on one of America's busiest streets, full of Broadway theatres and restaurants on a Saturday night.

Detectives are understood to be investigating similarities between the New York bomb and two car bombs planted by Al Qaeda terrorists outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London three years ago.

In both cases, the devices were composed of propane gas and cans full of petrol intended to be ignited by electronic detonators.

Pakistani army kills 22 Taliban near Afghan border

Militant attacks have killed nearly 3,300 people since July 2007 across Pakistan.Pakistani troops have been pursuing an anti-Taliban offensive since late March

Army helicopter gunships pounded insurgent hideouts in northwest Pakistan on Sunday, killing at least 22 militants, a government official said.

Samiullah Khan said the hideouts hit were in the Dabori area and its neighboring villages of the Orakzai tribal region near the Afghan border. He added the aerial strikes also destroyed six militant compounds.

Khan said the militants fired mortars at an army checkpoint in Mishti Mela area in Lower Orakzai, wounding two soldiers.

Pakistani forces launched an operation in Orakzai in mid-March to flush out militants who last year fled an army offensive in South Waziristan. The troops are believed to have retaken several areas from the Taliban in the region.

Thousands of people have fled the area. Most of them have moved in with relatives in nearby districts.

Independent confirmation of the casualties and the identities of those killed is virtually impossible because the region is remote and dangerous and media access there is restricted.

The tribal region is the primary base of Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud.

Mehsud was believed killed in a mid-January suspected U.S. missile strike, but intelligence officials now say he is thought to have survived.

Profile: Hakimullah Mehsud - Leader of Taliban Pakistan directly threathen USA.Alleged killed but survive.

Hakimullah has been reported killed several times in the past year 


Mehsud, left, has vowed to continue war of attrition against the Pakistani military


 Hakimullah was involved in al-Balawi's attack on CIA operatives in Afghanistan


Speculation over the faith of Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of Tehrik-e-Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, has been widespread since reports emerged that he had been killed in a US drone attack in northwestern Pakistan on January 14.

Mehsud came to prominence in the Taliban movement after a number of devastating raids on the nation's regular army in 2007.

His first-ever mention in an English-language newspaper came when he was appointed as a spokesman for Baitullah Mehsud, his predecessor.

Mehsud then gained a reputation for his fighting skills, particularly with the AK-47, and served as Baitullah Mehsud's deputy commander until the leader died in a CIA drone missile strike in August 8, 2009.

Aged about 30 years old and never shy of the media, Hakimullah Mehsud is reportedly an extremely mobile Taliban commander - cropping up in one or other of the tribal areas regularly, especially the Khyber, Kurram and Orakzai tribal agencies.

He is an articulate leader, frequently spelling out his organisation's objectives: to maintain the campaign of attrition against the Pakistani army in order to carve out a Pashtun Taliban emirate in Pakistan.

He is also the Pakistani Taliban's most successful leader to date. In one especially audacious raid, he captured 300 Pakistani soldiers - an attack that local journalists say added greatly to his prestige.

'Lively and dangerous'

Shafiq Ahmad, a reporter for Geo TV in Peshawar, met the leader at the beginning of 2009.

"Hakimullah is a lively man," he said.

"He told us he could give us two gifts. One was the Humvee military vehicle that his fighters had captured during a recent raid in the Khyber pass on an Afghanistan-bound supply convoy for Nato forces.

"The other was a jeep that his men had snatched from UN employees."

Another journalist, the BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan, met Mehsud at the same time and was impressed by a "handsome young man with a pleasant demeanour", even though "danger radiated from him".

"He [would] drive like a man possessed, manoeuvring around razor sharp bends at barely possible speeds ... braking inches short of a several hundred-foot drop."

Mehsud was born near the town of Jandola in South Waziristan around 1980 and went to a small village school in Hangu District.

Mehsud's reputation has only grown with every inaccurate claim by the Pakistani government to have killed him.

On August 10, 2009, Pakistani officials proudly announced his death, saying he had been hit by an unmanned drone attack after intercepting his phone calls.

But just hours later a Reuters news agency journalist reported he had spoken to Mehsud after the attack.

Later, on September 5, Pakistan forces "captured a man who confessed to killing Hakimullah", according to the national newspaper The Daily Times, which also headlined four weeks later that Hakimullah had most probably died on October 1.

The headline was ruined three days later when the press-loving leader met a group of reporters in a bid to end any premature speculation of his demise.

Pakistan Taliban chief threatens US - Mehsud surfaces on video to threaten strikes on U.S.

The new video shows Hakimullah Mehsud threatening attacks on the US

Four months after he was believed killed in a U.S. drone strike, Pakistan Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud has appeared in a new video, vowing revenge attacks against major American cities.

Mehsud threatened to carry out strikes against the US within a month for killings of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders as he surfaced in a nine-minute video apparently made on April 4, U.S. monitoring groups reported.

“The time is very near when our fidayeen will attack states in major US cities,” Mehsud warned on the video where he was shown flanked by two armed masked men.

This is the first time that Taliban have directly threatened to carry out suicide attacks on the US soil, on the pattern of their close allies Al-Qaeda.

The video comes in the wake of an attempted car bombing in New York’s Times Square on Sunday and follows another video released by Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) in which the group claimed responsibility for the failed strike. The U.S. investigative agencies have however ruled out the attack being handiwork of any Islamist terror organisation.

C.I.A. Missile Strike May Have Killed Pakistan’s Taliban Leader, Officials Say

Officials in Washington and Islamabad were scrambling to make sense of communications intercepts and other intelligence that seemed to indicate that Mr. Mehsud might have been killed in the strike. By Thursday evening, American officials said they were growing increasingly confident that the Taliban leader was dead.

The missile struck a house in the remote village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan, about 1 a.m. Wednesday. Local residents reached by telephone confirmed that one of the wives of Mr. Mehsud, the leader of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, was among those killed. Her name or age could not be confirmed.

Five others, including four children, were reportedly wounded in the missile strike.

The compound where the attack took place belonged to Ikramuddin Mehsud, a local tribal elder whose daughter is Baitullah Mehsud’s second wife.

The strike by a drone early Wednesday morning hit a compound in the remote village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan. Village residents said that day that one of Mr. Mehsud’s wives had been killed in the attack and that several children had been wounded.

Pakistani officials publicly condemn these attacks, but they have privately given their blessing to the strikes in the country’s tribal areas, in part because the missile attacks increasingly have focused on Mr. Mehsud’s network.

Baitullah Mehsud, the self-professed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has vowed to to send more suicide bombers to kill US troops in Afghanistan.(The Mehsuds are a large warrior Pashtun tribe renowned for never being pacified by the British forces.)

The US homeland security chief is calling on Pakistan to strike back against Taliban fighters on its border with Afghanistan.

The US and NATO say a truce between the Taliban and Pakistan in the North-West Frontier province has already led to more fighting.

Still, they cautioned that it may be weeks before they are certain, and they may never gain access to the remote location in South Waziristan to perform DNA tests.

“There is reason to believe that reports of his death may be true, but it can’t be confirmed at this time,” said an American official with access to classified intelligence reports.

Mr. Mehsud and his military network have been blamed for a wave of violence across Pakistan, including the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister.

The militant leader also seemed to take pleasure in taunting Pakistani officials and holding news conferences to demonstrate the inability of officials in Islamabad to rein in his network.

Mr. Mehsud pledged to attack Washington, but American officials did not take the threat seriously. Still, his network is believed to have close ties to Qaeda leaders in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The C.I.A. made killing Mr. Mehsud one of its top priorities this year, partly at the urging of Pakistan’s civilian government. Pakistani officials, including President Asif Ali Zardari, had complained that the campaign of missile strikes by American drones was killing only militants responsible for killing American troops in Afghanistan.

Since then, the State Department has offered a reward of as much as $5 million for Mr. Mehsud. The C.I.A. also began trying to track his daily movements, and American intelligence officials believed on several occasions that they had almost killed him.

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Past news :- Baitullah Mehsud believed to responsible for Bhutto assassinations.

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Insider story : Pakistan Taliban.Peace talks between the Pakistani government and Taliban rebels have collapsed as the government refused to pull its troops out of its tribal border region with Afghanistan. Inside Story asks what the failure of the talks will mean for Pakistan.

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