London police arrest man over Pakistan politician 2010 murder

• London police arrest man over Pakistan politician 2010 murder 1:41pm BST

  
  

  LONDON Wed Aug 27, 2014 1:41pm BST
  
  
  
  

  Police stand near the home of Imran Farooq, who died after an attack outside his home in Edgware, north London September 17, 2010.
  

  Credit: Reuters/Suzanne Plunkett
  
  
  (Reuters) - London police said on Wednesday they had arrested a man in connection with the murder of senior Pakistani politician Imran Farooq who was stabbed to death in the British capital in 2010.
  Farooq, 50, a founding member of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), was on his way home from work in north London when he was attacked. Police believe he had been under surveillance in the days and weeks before his murder.
  His death brought Pakistan's biggest city Karachi to a standstill after the MQM, the most influential party in Pakistan's commercial capital, declared 10 days of mourning.
  Detectives from the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command said they had arrested a 30-year-old man at a house in east London on suspicion of being involved in Farooq's murder. He has been taken to a central London police station for questioning.
  The arrest is the second made by London police in the hunt for Farooq's killer. In June last year a 52-year-old man was arrested at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of conspiracy to murder after landing on a flight from Canada.
  He remains on police bail while detectives continue their investigation and is due to return to a London police station in late October.
  Officers also want to speak to two Pakistani nationals, Moshin Ali Syed, 29, and Muhammad Kashif Khan Kamran, 35, who were in Britain at the time of the attack, in connection with the murder.
  Farooq claimed asylum in Britain in 1999 after more than seven years on the run from Pakistani police who accused him of involvement in murder and other serious crimes, charges he denied.
  He had been inactive in politics for about two years before he was murdered outside his home in Edgware. Police said they found a 5-1/2 inch kitchen knife and a brick used in the attack at the scene.
  Farooq was one of several senior members of the MQM who had sought refuge in London. The party's top leader Altaf Hussain, who is wanted in Pakistan in relation to a murder case, has also lived in self-imposed exile in the British capital since 1992.
  He himself was arrested, in June this year, on suspicion of money-laundering, leading to protests which led to lockdown in Karachi as shopkeepers and market-stall owners closed their businesses.
  Despite his exile, Hussain, one of Pakistan's most feared and divisive figures, still exerts control over much of the sprawling port city of 18 million from his north London headquarters.
  The MQM party represents the descendants of Urdu-speaking migrants from India who settled in Pakistan after the partition of the subcontinent at the end of British rule in 1947.
  (Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Stephen Addison)
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