Three Lashkar-e-Janghvi activists, arrested in connection with the plot to blow up a bridge near Raiwind on which Sharif's cavalcade was to pass, have close links with the Harkat-ul-Ansar, active in Kashmir, the reports said.

The Pakistani paper The News International quoting the secret report, forwarded to the cabinet, said the three, Sarfraz Siddiq, Noor Gul and Mohammad Arshad had received training in Harkat camps at Khost near the Pakistan-Afghan border.

While the three were later mysteriously shot dead in custody, the chief of the Lashkar-e-Janghvi, which had announced a booty on Sharif's head, has fled Pakistan and sought shelter in Afghan terrorist camps, the paper said.

In the report, Pakistan's leading intelligence agencies have admitted for the first timethat ``over 800 Pakistanis were under training at the Khaled bin Waleed camp in Afghanistan, most of them linked to the fundamentalist Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Sunni Sipaha-e-Sahaba.''

In a grim reminder to the government, the report warned that the Lashkar, which had hitherto restricted its activities to Kashmir, was fast evolving sectarian and terrorist dimensions which can have an adverse impact on law and order in the country.

The intelligence report said the Harkat had ``not only deepened involvement in terrorist activities in Pakistan, but also evolved a foreign agenda as well, indicating disturbing possibilities which bode ill for the country.''

Successive Pakistani governments had so far been denying that the mercenary group, linked by British and American media reports to terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, functioned from Muzzaffarabad in Pakistan, the paper said.

In fact, shortly after the US air strikes on suspected terrorist training camps on the Pakistan-Afghan border in December,Harkat chief Maulana Fazul Rahman, appeared with heavily armed bodyguards in Islamabad to address the international media.

The US State Department declared the Harkat-ul-Ansar a terrorist organisation along with other groups such as the Hamas, Hizbollah, Al Jehad, LTTE and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in 1997.

In its latest report on `Patterns of Global Terrorism', the State Department gave graphic details of the Harkat's terrorist operations in Kashmir and its links with Al Faran, the group that has held four Westerners hostages since 1995.