Convictions in the 'Karachi affair'.

IT has taken nearly a quarter of a century of a complex, stop-start investigation to shed some light on the epic cloak-and-dagger saga that became known over time as the 'Karachi affair'. On Monday, a Paris court sentenced six men to prison for their role in a scandal involving kickbacks on an arms deal between France and Pakistan in 1994. A car bombing on May 8, 2002, outside what was then Karachi's Sheraton hotel turned out to be a seminal moment in this tale, pitching it from being about financial misconduct to a possible act of revenge for unpaid commissions. Fifteen people were killed and several injured in the attack. Of the dead, 11 were French naval engineers working on a submarine project for the Pakistan Navy; they were leaving the hotel on their way to the dockyard when the explosives-laden vehicle rammed into their bus.

Given this happened the year following 9/11, at a time of burgeoning militancy in this country - and barely three months after Daniel Pearl's murder - the attack was suspected of having been carried out by religious extremists. That may well have been so, considering the Musharraf government's recent crackdown against several extremist organisations. However, French intelligence agencies later said their investigations turned up evidence of unpaid kickbacks in the Agosta deal by their government to figures in Pakistan's corridors of power. That, they believed, was the motive behind the bombing. The deal for the sale by France of three Agosta military submarines to Pakistan was worth around pound 1bn; of this, some pound 50m were to...

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