Claims that South African tourist destinations were under threat of terrorist attack were dismissed as untrue by the government on Wednesday.
Reports on Tuesday quoted Pakistani officials as saying that two South Africans arrested in a raid in Pakistan admitted planning terror strikes in South Africa during interrogation.
The South Africans were among about a dozen people detained after a 12-hour shootout with security forces at a house in Gujrat, south-east of Islamabad, on July 25.
Pakistani security agencies did not have such information, government spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe said in Pretoria.
”If there were any such information, the first people to know would have been their counterparts in South Africa,” Netshitenzhe told reporters.
National Intelligence Agency director general Vusi Mavimbela said there is no need for South Africans to panic.
‘Men railed against US’
Earlier on Wednesday, a senior police official in Pakistan was reported as saying the two South African men — arrested along with a senior al-Qaeda terrorist — were plotting attacks on tourist sites in their home country and railed against the United States after they were detained.
The South African suspects have been identified as Feroz Ibrahim, believed to be in his thirties, and Zubair Ismail, a man in his twenties, said Raja Munawar Hussain, the chief of police in Gujrat, the eastern Pakistani city where they were arrested on July 25 after a 12-hour gun battle.
Hussain said authorities found several maps of South African cities among the items seized after the raid, which also netted Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian with a $25-million bounty on his head for the 1998 twin US embassy bombings in East Africa.
”They were all very well-trained terrorists because of the way they fought the gun battle and the way they engaged us for 12 hours. This is something no common man could have done,” Hussain said.
A Lahore-based intelligence official said authorities believe the men wanted to target tourist sites in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial centre. The men are believed to have arrived in Pakistan on a flight from the United Arab Emirates just days before their arrest.
The Johannesburg daily The Star quoted unidentified police sources as saying that key landmarks were among the targets, including the Carlton Centre shopping mall, the JSE Securities Exchange and the Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg; Parliament and the V&A Waterfront mall in Cape Town; and the US embassy, government buildings and the Sheraton hotel in Pretoria.
SA maps found in al-Qaeda raid