NEW DELHI: Pakistani investigators have failed to locate Lahore resident Sattar Khan, one of the two suspects wanted for the firebombing of the Samjhauta Express.

Pakistani intelligence officials, highly placed official sources said, questioned Mr. Khan's relatives in Lahore, but without apparent success. Although Pakistani authorities have determined that Mr. Khan's passport was legitimate, no information has been made available on his possible links to jihadi organisations or his current whereabouts.

Mr. Khan travelled to India on a legitimate visa in November 2006. An investigation was initiated as he failed to return home even after his visa expired.

Delhi police officials then discovered that the address he provided to obtain the visa was fictitious, and they placed him on a terrorism watch-list.

Rana Shaukat Ali, a department store owner from Faislabad in Pakistan, told the police that a photograph of Mr. Khan resembled one of the four men he saw getting off the train shortly before the incendiary devices exploded.

Sixty-eight people, including five of Mr. Ali's six children, were killed in the attack.

Indore residents Huzaifa Halim Ali and Puran Singh Thakur, who ran the store from which the bombers purchased the cheap cloth-covered suitcases used to keep the incendiary devices, corroborated Mr. Ali's identification, sources in the firebombing investigation said.

A three-member Indian delegation, led by External Affairs Ministry Additional Secretary K.C. Singh, handed over a dossier on Mr. Khan to the Pakistan Foreign Office during a March 7 meeting of the Joint Mechanism on Terrorism, set up in the wake of last year's serial bombings in Mumbai.

Indian investigators believe Mr. Khan may have been linked to a Karachi-based terror network run by Shahid Bilal, a one-time resident of Hyderabad, who has allegedly commanded several major Lashkar-e-Taiba operations since 2004.

Bilal, sources in the Andhra Pradesh police claim, has close connections with cadre of the Harkat ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI), a Bangladesh-based terrorist group, which has executed several major attacks in India.

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