Islamabad, May 07: Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) denies US media reports that the group has links with the suspect behind the failed car bomb attack in New York’s Times Square.
Azam Tariq, a spokesperson for the TTP, rejected the report first circulated by The New York Times, saying that “we don’t even know him. We did not train him,” AFP reported on Thursday.
The New York Times had earlier claimed mounting evidence suggest that the pro-Taliban group had a hand in the attempt to detonate a car bomb at a crowded Manhattan theater district.
Tariq said the alleged link is just “propaganda against us,” adding, “If we are involved in something, we admit it.”
The spokesman said the plot could also have been “hatched by the US and its allies to trap Muslim and Pushtun youth in terrorist activities.”
Faisal Shahzad, the alleged Times Square car bomber, had driven in his white Pathfinder SUV from Connecticut to the bustling Manhattan theater district on April 28.
Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American, is currently being held in New York on charges of terrorism and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
However, a senior US security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, was quoted by AFP as saying that “so far no concrete evidence has yet linked him to any group in Pakistan.”
——–Agencies