KABUL, 22 March 2004 — About a dozen suspected Al-Qaeda or Taleban militants have been captured in Afghanistan after crossing the border from Pakistan, where a major military offensive is under way, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday.
Some “one dozen” people had been captured by border authorities over the past week and were being investigated, the spokesman Omar Samad said.
“Over the past week or so there have been some individuals who have been arrested along the border who seem to be infiltrators,” Samad told AFP.
“It could be that some of them are hardcore militants.” The nationalities of the group arrested were not yet known, he said, adding that these types of arrests were not unusual along the frontier.
Samad was unable to confirm information from an Afghan intelligence source that 50 Al-Qaeda militants had crossed over from Pakistan’s tribal areas, now the focus of an intense military operation to capture fighters belonging to the terror network. Despite the ongoing US-led Operation Mountain Storm in Afghanistan’s south and southeastern provinces and the Pakistani offensive on other side of the border, the region had been - “relatively calm on our side,” he said.
However, there had been a number of small skirmishes in the area and hundreds of additional Afghan soldiers have been sent to reinforce the porous border, Samad said.
“We are being very attentive so that no one escapes across the border,” he said. “As far as new deployments are concerned, since Operation Mountain Storm started and also since the operation across the border we have deployed ... 300 or so fresh troops.”
These soldiers had been sent to the border areas of Afghanistan facing South Waziristan, he said, and were in addition to thousands of troops with the Afghan National Army, border guards and local militias permanently in place there.
