KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — Heavily armed police wearing body armor stormed a suspected al-Qaida hide-out Wednesday, killing two gunmen and capturing at least five others in a three-hour shooting battle, police said.
Five officers — three policemen and two intelligence agents — were wounded, two of them critically, police said. The federal Interior Ministry in Islamabad said all the gunmen were foreigners but did not say from what country. A police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the gunmen were Arabs and Afghans.
Many al-Qaida fugitives are believed to have taken refuge in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, after the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The city has been a hotbed of sectarian violence and militant groups targeting foreigners.
A police official said a laptop and ‘‘literature’’ were found in the apartment and that the gunmen were suspected to be linked to al-Qaida. Police initially said a child was killed in Wednesday crossfire but later issued a statement saying ‘‘that appeared to be incorrect.’’
The intelligence officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said police raided the apartment, located in a five-story building in an upscale neighborhood, after receiving a tip that ‘‘suspicious people were living there.’’
Police chief Kamal Shah said two of the gunmen were arrested inside the apartment. Others fled to the roof, where they battled police for three hours before they were killed or captured.
The gunmen were armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, submachine guns and grenades — a heavier arsenal than is usually carried by ordinary Karachi criminals.
But Shah refused to say anything about their identity. ‘‘I’m not saying that they were ordinary criminals, but I have to take stock of the situation,’’ he told reporters shortly after the siege ended.
The intelligence official at the scene said one of the gunmen scrawled ‘‘There is no God but Allah’’ in Arabic in his own blood on the tiles of the kitchen wall.
While the shooting was still under way, police brought one woman and her young child, both in tears, to safety. ‘‘I don’t know how many more are inside,’’ she told an Associated Press reporter as she was quickly led away.
As the gunmen held out on the roof, police commandos in body armor and helmets entered the building and slowly worked their way to the upper floors. Police, firing on the gunmen from the roofs of neighboring buildings, called on them to surrender. The gunmen responded with chants of ‘‘Allahu Akbar,’’ or God is Great.
Within minutes, a burly, curly haired man was brought out with his entire face covered by a blindfold. Hundreds of policemen fired off volleys of gunfire to celebrate his capture. The final gunman was captured shortly afterward.
Shops in the area slammed down their shutters, and residents locked their doors and windows. Streets all around the neighborhood were deserted.
Pakistan police have been on alert for terrorist activity for the 9/11 anniversary, but a criminal motive also could be behind the incident.
Karachi has become a frequent site of militant activity. Last weekend, Yosri Fouda, a correspondent for the satellite station Al-Jazeera said he interviewed two plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh — at a secret location in Karachi in June.
In January, Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl was kidnapped here. His body was found in May. Four Islamic militants were convicted in July, and one of them, British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was sentenced to death. The others received life sentences.
A car bomb in May killed 11 French engineers and three other people, including the suicide attacker. Twelve Pakistanis were killed in June when a car bomb exploded outside the U.S. Consulate here.

LACKAWANNA, N.Y. (AP) — Clutching a shortwave radio tuned to an Arabic music station in Kuwait, Hassan Muhsen talked at length about the lure of immigrant life in the United States before his mood suddenly darkened.
‘‘Thank God we’re in America, the system is good and fair, but there is ignorance also,’’ said the 53-year-old retired steelworker. ‘‘Since yesterday I heard it three times: ‘Go home!’’’
Five men from Lackawanna’s Yemeni community were arrested and accused of aiding the terrorists who planned the Sept. 11 attacks. The men — all U.S. born — were charged Saturday with providing support and resources to foreign terrorist organizations.
Now, the town’s Yemeni-Americans must contend with suspicion and hostility from some of their non-Yemeni neighbors.
‘‘I had no suspicion before, not even when 9/11 happened,’’ said Anne Vertino, 34, as she sat outside her mother’s house across the street from a shuttered grocery store where FBI agents arrested one of the suspects in raids Friday night and early Saturday.
‘‘But knowing what happened and they’re your neighbors in a small city, definitely you’re going to treat them different and wonder what’s going on. It’s not the women I worry about or the children, it’s the men,’’ she said.
Federal authorities say the five men trained at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden spoke about his anti-American beliefs before returning home in June 2001 to Lackawanna, a suburb of Buffalo on the shore of Lake Erie. Officials said they had no information the alleged terror cell was planning an attack in the United States.
Charged Saturday were Shafal Mosed, 24; Faysal Galab, 26; Sahim Alwan, 29; Yasein Taher, 24; and Yahya Goba, 25. The men all lived within blocks of each other in Lackawanna.
Peter Ahearn, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo field office, said he worries the Yemeni community will be ostracized, but said hate crimes would not be tolerated.
‘‘The role of the FBI is twofold,’’ he said. ‘‘One is that we’re going to conduct investigations of any terrorists, Muslim or not. That’s our job. The other side of the coin, and we dealt with this right after 9/11, is that we investigate civil rights.’’
About 1,000 Yemenis live in Lackawanna, working mostly in the fading steel industry at a galvanizing plant, a Ford plant or an aluminum producer.
Crouching next to the Lackawanna Islamic Center mosque, a 30-year-old man who identified himself only as Abdullah said the neighborhood has been relatively free of ethnic tension since Yemenis first moved here in 1922.
‘‘We have a good relationship around here — blacks, whites and a little Hispanic,’’ he said. ‘‘We might not know each other personally but we know each other by our faces.’’
The atmosphere has become tense, he acknowledged.
‘‘We’re going to have stares here and there, maybe a couple of words,’’ he said. ‘‘What are you going to do? Are you going to fight, argue with people? You’ve just got to be patient.’’
Jim Hardwick, 70, who is black and has lived among the Yemenis for a half-century, said he hasn’t changed his view of his neighbors.
‘‘That’s five (men) out of thousands,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t have any opinion on the ones that I don’t know. If I don’t know ’em, I don’t know ’em. The ones that I know, they would never be involved in what happened.
‘‘You can’t talk about anybody as a group,’’ he added. ‘‘You have to talk about individuals.’’

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The first two bodies were found crammed inside yellow metal barrels in a field in rural Kansas. Days later, three more missing women were found dead in 55-gallon drums at a storage locker 30 miles away in Missouri.
Authorities say John E. Robinson Sr. — who owned the field and rented the locker — had trolled the Internet for sex under the name ‘‘slavemaster’’ and is responsible for both Kansas murders as well as four other killings, sexual assaults and the fraudulent adoption of the infant daughter of one of his victims.
That infant, now a teenager, was raised by Robinson’s brother, who authorities say thought the adoption was legitimate.
On Monday, jury selections begins in Robinson’s Kansas trial, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Robinson, 58, is charged there with the deaths of Suzette Trouten and Izabela Lewicka, whose decomposing bodies were found in the field in 2000, and with the killing of the adopted child’s mother, Lisa Stasi, whose body was never found.
Residents of the mobile home park where Robinson lived at the time of his arrest said they believed he was a good family man who enjoyed spending time with his grandchildren. He had been married for 37 years.
But prosecutors say Robinson was a con artist who lured women with promises of a good job and world travel, and who solicited sadomasochistic encounters in Internet chat rooms under the name, ‘‘slavemaster.’’
Two women who met Robinson at separate hotels later claimed they were sexually assaulted.
Robinson had forced some of his victims to write letters to family members telling them all was well, according to the prosecution’s case. The correspondence eventually stopped, and the women disappeared.
Johnson County authorities began investigating after Trouten’s parents said they hadn’t heard from their daughter. They now believe the 28-year-old was killed in 2000.
In March of that year, investigators started following Robinson.
A search of his rural property turned up the barrels and, in them, the bodies of Trouten and Lewicka, 22.
Authorities believe Lewicka had been dead since 1999.
Stasi, 19, has been missing since 1985.
Prosecutors believe Robinson convinced Stasi he was involved in an organization that helped young mothers. They say Robinson’s brother, believing the adoption was legitimate, paid him $5,500 to cover adoption expenses for Stasi’s infant daughter.
A gag order on the defense and prosecution attorneys in the case prevents them from making further comments outside the trial.
In Missouri, Robinson is charged with the deaths of Sheila Faith, 45, and her daughter, Debbie, 16, who were last seen in the summer of 1994 after moving to the area from Colorado, and Beverly Bonner, 49, formerly of Cameron, Mo., missing since 1994.
He faces the death penalty there as well.