ISLAMABAD, 7 October — The government yesterday denied that the United States has asked it to hand over five Arab convicts who have served their sentences in Pakistan for a 1986 hijacking but have no country to return to.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman told reporters in Islamabad that only one of the originally six hijackers of a PanAm airliner had been accepted by Jordan as its national.
“I cannot pre-judge the decision of a court,” spokesman Riaz Muhammad Khan said when asked to comment on press reports that the Lahore High Court had been approached to stop the deportation of the hijackers, said to be of Palestinian origin. Khan said Pakistan had joined the international coalition against terrorism on the principle that terrorism of all kinds has to be opposed.
“Today we are experiencing the horror of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the US and trying to bring the criminals behind it to justice. But in the longer term the world must also address the pain of millions suffering suppression and injustices,” he said, listing Palestine and Kashmir as examples.
Khan said Pakistan did not plan to send another delegation to Afghanistan to advise the Taleban rulers who are the target of the US war on terrorism for hiding suspected terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden.
“Our support for a broad-based government in Kabul representing all segments and ethnic groups in Afghanistan is nothing new,” he said when asked if Pakistan had ditched its Taleban friends after joining the US war on terrorism.
“It would be a welcome development,” the spokesman said when asked to comment on the Taleban’s decision to release a British woman journalist and an offer to release eight other Western prisoners if the US stopped threatening Afghanistan with military strikes.
On British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s visit to Pakistan, spokesman Khan said it brought relations between the two countries out of the cold and back to “complete normalcy”. He said he foresaw cooperation in all fields between the two countries.
“Reactivation of cooperation in the defense field only confirms that bilateral relations are now normal,” he said, referring to the remarks made by Blair after talks with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf on Friday night.
Blair’s four-hour visit to Islamabad was meant to build a global coalition against terrorism following last month’s terror attacks in the United States.
Pakistan, which was being ostracized for the military coup in 1999, is now being wooed by the US-led coalition as a front-line state in its war on terrorism which is expected to be fought in bordering Afghanistan. Blair announced economic assistance and debt relief to heavily indebted Pakistan and restoration of political contacts with the country.
