Pakistan police arrested three Taliban militants planning "big terror attacks" on Saturday amid a wave of violence engulfing the financial hub Karachi, the force said.
"The three men, who belong to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) were arrested from the Site industrial area during a police encounter on Saturday morning," a senior police official, Raja Omar Khittab told AFP.
Bomb attacks on Shiite Muslims have killed 76 people in Pakistan's richest city this year while riots and a surge in political shootings have sparked fears that after relative quiet, Karachi is descending into violence.
The southern port has been spared the worst of a two-year Islamist bombing campaign conducted elsewhere but is plagued by kidnappings which analysts say bankroll militant campaigns in the northwest and in Afghanistan.
"We are interrogating the three TTP militants," Khittab said, adding: "We also seized a bomb-making laboratory in the nearby Qaim Khan Colony on the basis of information provided by the rebels."
He said the arrested men were planning "big terror attacks" in Karachi, adding that police recovered a huge quantity of explosives, detonators and other equipment from the laboratory.
Local intelligence officials confirmed the arrests and said Subhan Ghani, one of the three men, was leader of the trio.
Security has plummeted over the last three years in Pakistan, where militant attacks have killed more than 3,000 people since July 2007 and Washington has put the country on the frontline of its war on Al-Qaeda.
Pakistan is under major US pressure to do more to eliminate Islamist networks that have carved out training grounds and havens in the country's northwest to plot attacks against Western troops fighting in Afghanistan.
