ISLAMABAD, Aug 4 (AFP) - Pakistani authorities suspect outlawed Islamic militant outfits were involved in last week's assassination attempt on prime minister-designate Shaukat Aziz, officials said Wednesday.
"We have made a few arrests as the investigation continues," interior ministry spokesman Rauf Chaudhry told AFP.
"We suspect people from banned jihadi groups are involved," he said, referring to extremist organisations outlawed by President Pervez Musharraf to curb sectarian violence and religious militancy in the world's second largest Muslim country.
"They are being interrogated by civil and military intelligence agencies," he added, without giving the exact number of people taken into custody.
"We are trying to find out who is behind them."
Several people have been detained, questioned and released since Aziz narrowly survived a suicide bomb attack at an election rally near Islamabad on Friday, he said.
Former Citibank executive and current finance minister Aziz, a close ally of Musharraf, is to take over as prime minister after his election to the lower house later this month. He currently sits in the senate.
Chaudhry said the government had posted a reward of 10 million rupees (about 172,500 dollars) for information leading to the plotters' capture. It was advertised in newspapers on Tuesday.
Soon after Aziz finished his speech the suicide bomber walked up to his car and blew himself up. The blast left nine people dead including the bomber.
A militant group calling itself "Al-Islambouli Brigades, Al-Qaeda organization" claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on an Islamist website.
The attack was in response to Musharraf's handover of Islamist militants to the United States, it said.
Pakistan, joining the US-led war against terrorism in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, has arrested more than 500 Al-Qaeda suspects and handed the majority over to US custody.
The purported group is named after Khaled al-Islambouli, an army officer who assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat during a military parade in 1981.
Pakistan has also contacted the Egyptian government for details about the Islambouli group, officials said.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said on Sunday the attempt on Aziz's life could be in "retaliation" to the arrest of key Al-Qaeda suspect Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian national who was on the FBI's most-wanted list.
"Ghailani was a big catch as he had trained many militants for suicide bombings," the minister told AFP.
He was indicted in the United States in the August 7, 1998, bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which more than 200 people were killed.
The attack on Aziz came less than 24 hours after the authorities announced Ghailani's July 25 arrest in a raid in the eastern industrial town of Gujrat.