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American investigation agencies are trying to find out if Faisal Shahzad -- the Pakistani-American arrested for the failed bombing plot at Times Square -- operated by himself or was assisted by other terror networks such as the Al Qaeda.
The investigators are now probing whether Shahzad had any links with David Coleman Headley, the Lashkar-e-Tayiba operative arrested from Chicago last year for plotting the terror attack on Mumbai in November, 2008.
They point out that Headley, like Shahzad, used Dubai extensively as a transit point to travel between United States and Pakistan, according to a report in the Daily Beast.
Though no concrete link between Headley and Shahzad has been revealed so far, the US administration has been taken aback by the arrest of two Pakistani-Americans on terror-related charges, within such a short time span.
Shahzad admitted that he attended a bomb-making camp at Waziristan in Pakistan. Investigators are now trying to reconstruct the details of his five-month long recent stay in Pakistan, in an attempt to uncover possible links with terror outfits based in that country.
They are specially intrigued by his visit to Peshawar, located close to the Taliban-infested border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Though Shahzad has told investigators that he carried out the bombing plot alone, without any accomplices, investigators find his claims hard to believe. They point out that it would be difficult for him to procure all the components of a car bomb and assemble them on his own, said the report.
The Daily Beast quoted a senior official as saying that given the 'bungled' nature of the attempted bombing, the suspect probably received some 'pretty lousy terror training'.