Karachi - Tag Search

(Updated below)
First of all, Majlis readers, I'd like to make a bit of an apology for our lackadaisical blogging over here in recent days. As many of you know, Gregg landed in Doha late last week to begin working for Al-Jazeera English, so he is understandably wrapped up in administrative paperwork, not to mention acclimating to the "unseasonably cool" 93-degree Gulf heat. Rest assured, he'll be back in fighting form soon.

Meanwhile, as many of you probably don't know, I too will be heading off to Doha this summer to join Gregg at Al-Jazeera. We'll both be on staff, reporting for their website, but you can expect that our asinine Middle East analysis and commentary will continue, here at the Majlis or elsewhere. So please excuse our scatterbrains in the meantime.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at the most recent news emerging about Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who has reportedly confessed to trying to detonate a car bomb in New York City's Times Square.

Asif Ali Zardari, the famously (allegedly) corrupt President of Pakistan, took $4.3 million worth of bribes for helping the French sell three submarines to his country in the mid-1990s, according to a report in the Pakistani press.

The three Agosta 90 submarines were worth roughly $1.24 billion (€825 million), according to the Nation, which cites the Pakistani French daily newspaper Liberation (Français).

It's a little hard to make out the details of how this bit of news surfaced, but it appears that there is an ongoing legal investigation by a French magistrate into a 2002 terrorist attack that killed 11 employees of the French defense company DCN, who were in Karachi working on the subs.

Pakistani police arrested seven men who were allegedly planning attacks in Karachi. Police raided a house in that city; they recovered three suicide vests, 15 kilograms of explosives, and a collection of guns and other items.

No word yet on what they were planning to attack, or how far along their plot was. But Pakistani media are describing the men as a "sleeper cell."

They also recovered between 1.5kg and 2kg of heroin, which the men allegedly planned to sell to finance their operations.