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Subject:
Pearl Murder, ISI and Pakistani Terrorism...
Draft Dodger
3/15/2002 9:14:33 PM
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Here is more ISI and Pakistani army connections to Pearl murder.
US: Ex-Pakistan agents linked to Pearl
By Anwar Iqbal
South Asian Affairs Analyst
WASHINGTON, March 15 (UPI) -- The United States gave Islamabad a list of former Pakistani intelligence agents U.S. authorities believe were linked to the abduction and slaying of American journalist Daniel Pearl, United Press International learned Friday.
And a UPI investigation has revealed Pakistani officials have engaged in a sustained campaign to prevent reporting of links between the country's intelligence services and the Muslim extremists accused of killing Pearl. UPI first reported the possible link on Jan. 29 in an exclusive.
A senior Pakistani official, who visited Washington last month with President Pervez Musharraf, told UPI that Pakistani authorities had been handed "some names of former ISI men," but added that, "after a thorough investigation, none of them were found (to be) involved (in the Pearl murder)."
ISI, or Inter Services Intelligence, is Pakistan's main spy agency. It recruited hundreds of Muslim extremists during the Afghan war of 1979-89, when it supervised the resistance against the Soviet occupation.
"The names (of the former agents) were first intercepted by the National Security Agency while monitoring signals from that region," a U.S. intelligence official told UPI. "They were handed over to a close aide of Musharraf within a week of Pearl's abduction."
ISI's former chief, Gen. Hamid Gul, also confirmed to UPI the Americans had given a list of ex-ISI officials to Pakistan after Pearl's abduction. Gul named some of these officials but said most of them had retired after the Afghan war when then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto sacked several officials, including Gul, from the agency.
Like Gul, many of those who were fired or retired from the ISI at that time had strong religious views and some maintained their links with Afghan mujahedin groups -- and later the Taliban -- after their retirement, as Gul himself did.
U.S. intelligence officials claim Ahmed Omar Saeed Shaikh, the chief suspect in the Pearl case, also had worked for ISI in the past, "as their dirty tricks man," as one of them put it. "We have reasons to believe that he has done break-ins, hostage takings and other similar chores for ISI," he said.
Pakistani officials deny ISI is linked with Omar, saying he never worked for any Pakistani government agency. But an investigation by UPI has revealed Pakistani officials tried to suppress reports in the local media suggesting Omar had worked for the agency.
Also, journalists visiting Pakistani Kashmir over the past two years have seen evidence that ISI officials were supervising military training for Islamic militants from Omar's group and other extremist organizations.
On Feb. 17, the reputable daily The News said Omar had told his Pakistani interrogators that he would expose ISI's links with Muslim militant groups if he were extradited to the United States.
Arrested last month, Omar -- a British-born Muslim of Pakistani origin -- confessed to kidnapping Pearl before a court in Karachi, but later said police forced him to do so.
On Thursday, Omar was indicted by a U.S. court on a charge of conspiracy to take a hostage resulting in death. U.S. authorities have urged Pakistan to send him to the United States to face trial.
"Hours before the paper was published a senior government official called me and asked me not to print this story. I told him it was already well past midnight and too late to take it out of the paper," Shaheen Sehbai, The News' then-editor, told UPI this week.
"The official also told me the ISI would be very upset if the story was published," recalled Sehbai, who moved to Washington last week after he was forced to resign for publishing the story.
"The next day, the government stopped all official advertisements to the Jang newspaper group," which is Pakistan's largest and publishes The News and several other leading dailies and magazines, Sehbai said.
Following this, Sehbai said, the group's owner, Mir Shaiklur Rahman, called him and asked him to see officials from ISI and the ministry of information to "sort out my differences with them."
Sehbai said he was asked to sack three reporters, but the newspaper's management and the government both deny this charge.
However, in a letter sent to Sehbai, Rahman admits to "discussing the fallout of the story ... which was perceived to be damaging to our national interest and elicited severe reaction by the government," with Sehbai.
The Feb. 17 article, which has since been removed from the newspaper's Web site, says a jailhouse statement by Omar links ISI not only with Jaish-e-Mohammed -- the group allegedly responsible for kidnapping and killing Pearl -- but also with the leader of a radical Muslim group called Tanzim-ul Fuqra or Organization of the Poor -- Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani.
Pearl was abducted while trying to interview Gilani. Before his abduction, he was investigating links between Jaish and Richard Reid, the so-called shoe-bomber accused of trying to blow up an American airplane.
Pearl was last seen driving in a car with Omar on Jan. 23. On Feb. 22 police received a videotape showing Pearl's decapitated body and reports in the Pakistani media have suggested the corpse was thrown into the Arabian Sea near Karachi.
The alleged links between ISI and extremist Islamic groups like Jaish have their roots in two long-standing regional conflicts, Kashmir and Afghanistan.
Throughout the 1990s in Pakistani Kashmir, ISI supervised several training camps run by Jaish-e-Mohammed and similar groups. Until Sept. 11, no serious effort was made to hide this relationship. Journalists often visited them to interview the militants and film them practicing guerilla war techniques.
In December 1999, two of Jaish's leaders -- including Omar -- were released from Indian jails in exchange for the passengers and crew of a hijacked airliner.
Despite this and allegations of other links to terrorism, Jaish-e-Mohammed -- or Army of Mohammed -- openly operated in Pakistan until the crackdown against militants that Musharraf instituted in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Following Sept. 11, Musharraf also purged ISI -- sacking many of those believed linked to Islamic extremism, including the agency's chief Gen. Mahmood Ahmed.
In Afghanistan, ISI was the conduit for U.S. support to Islamic militants fighting the Soviet occupation of that country during the 1980s.
Gul was put in charge of ISI by Pakistan's military leader Gen. Zia ul Haq during this period. Gul -- an avid Muslim with radical views -- packed the organization with officers from various branches of the Pakistani armed forces who had strong religious leanings and shared his vision of an Islamic revolution in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan.
According to Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, ISI was instrumental in setting up the Taliban to secure its dominant position in the region.
"ISI created the Taliban movement to ensure that it continued to control Kabul as well," he says.
"I did not collect religious minded officers from anywhere," Gul told UPI. "Pakistan is an Islamic country and most Muslims love their religion. In that sense, we are all religious minded." |
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