LONDON, Nov 5: Several young officers with the Pakistani Air Force were among 50 people arrested for trying to assassinate President Musharraf soon after he returned from a visit to the US and Britain late last month, a report published in The Sunday Telegraph said here.

Last month soon after the president’s arrival from his 18-day foreign tour, the country was rocked by three failed terrorist attempts within 24 hours, in one of which a low intensity explosive device went off harmlessly in a park near the Army house where the president lives, the other two incidents occurred in Islamabad, one near the government secretariat and the other close to the ISI headquarters. But the rockets placed at these sites did not go off perhaps because the trigger mechanism had failed to interface with the weapons.

“About 50 people are being held on suspicion of involvement in the September attack, which involved a battery of Russian-made 107 m projectiles launched by a signal from a mobile phone,” Pakistani intelligence sources were quoted as saying by The Sunday Telegraph.

“Alarmingly, many are understood to be young officers serving in the Pakistan Air Force, some of whom have access to high-security zones of the presidential offices, parliament and the intelligence service,” the newspaper said quoting intelligence sources.

Although interrogations have not revealed any of them to have links with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, they are none the less believed to have acted out of growing anger at Gen Musharraf’s alliance with America in its war on terror.

One official said that while the rocket strike itself had been relatively amateurish, it would have probably been lethal had the plotters been assisted beforehand by a terrorist group.

Although the president was not hurt, the attempt demonstrated the political instability engulfing his nation, which was heightened last week by his government’s bombing of a madressah in north-west Pakistan, the report said.