ISLAMABAD, 15 September 2003 — Pakistan yesterday dismissed as baseless a US intelligence report claiming that Pakistan helped Al-Qaeda members launch their operations in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

“This is a baseless report. The document itself says the information is raw. It does not seem to be founded on hard evidence,” a senior Foreign Ministry official told AFP.

The US intelligence documents made public in Washington claimed Pakistan helped Al-Qaeda members launch their operations in Afghanistan in the 1990s and secretly ran a major training camp used by Osama Bin Laden’s terror network.

The documents, produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 2001 and declassified last week, also indicate that legendary Afghan guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Masood may have been killed two days before the Sept. 11 attacks because he knew about Bin Laden’s plan and “began to warn the West.”

In its secret dispatches the DIA paints a complex picture of factional rivalry, in which Pakistan tried to use the Taleban and Al-Qaeda to promote its influence in war-torn Afghanistan — only to lose control over both of them.

The Pakistani Foreign Ministry official said Islamabad had not yet officially received the report, but said its “contents seem to be absurd and baseless.”

Pakistan was a key Taleban backer until it abandoned the hard-line Islamic militia after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and became a front-line state in the US-led war against terrorism.

It has arrested some 500 Al-Qaeda suspects since the fall of the Taleban regime in late 2001 and the US authorities have praised Pakistan’s cooperation in the war on terror.

Officials here say Al-Qaeda surfaced during the US-backed jihad (holy war) against the 1979-89 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“They funded it, financed it and provided equipment and training to create a force of holy warriors or mujahedeen to fight the Russians,” a close aide to Pakistan former intelligence chief Akhtar Abdul Rehman, said. Rehman, who headed the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence when Pakistan channeled US weapons to Afghan Mujahedeen during Soviet occupation, died in a plane crash in August 1988 Along with then President Mohammad Zia-ul Haq.

Afghan watcher Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, who had been involved in negotiations with former Taleban leaders, also described the report as “hilarious.”

“When the jihad was on, US airlines used to offer 50 percent rebate to Arabs who would volunteer to participate in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan,” Ashrafi told AFP.

Ashrafi, who is chairman of the Pakistan Ulema (Muslim scholars) Council and a regional government adviser, added: “The US military strategists were at that time living in Pakistan. They provided weapons and selected the location of training camps in Afghanistan.”