ISLAMABAD, 12 September 2003 — Islamists in Pakistan yesterday poured cold water on calls purportedly by Al-Qaeda’s number two to rise up against President Pervez Musharraf for “selling Muslims’ blood in Afghanistan”.
The calls were broadcast by the Al-Jazeera television network in an audiotape allegedly carrying the voice of Ayman Al-Zawahri, Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man in the global terror network.
Pakistan’s largest Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), embroiled in a protracted political battle with Musharraf over his unelected presidency and sweeping powers, rejected the exhortations.
“Myself and my party do not endorse Zawahri’s views. We are trying to reform Pakistan’s internal matters in our own way,” JI Senator Khurshid Ahmed said.
“We have differences with Musharraf’s policies, but we are not working to launch a coup against him. We are striving to bring change through a political struggle.”
The audiotape was aired along with a videotape showing Al-Zawahri with Bin Laden in an undetermined mountain location. Al-Jazeera said the videotape was probably recorded in late April or early May, but the recording carried no indication of the date.
The speaker on the audiotape exhorted Pakistanis to avenge Musharraf’s support of the US-led overthrow of Afghanistan’s Taleban regime for harboring Bin Laden in late 2001, and Pakistan’s arrests of some 500 Al-Qaeda suspects.
“We ask our Muslim brethren in Pakistan: until when will you put up with the traitor Musharraf, who sold the Muslims’ blood in Afghanistan and handed over the Arab mujahideen to crusader America?” the speaker said. “Had it not been for his treason, the surrogate government would not have been installed in Kabul, that government which brought the Indians to Pakistan’s western borders.”
Many Pakistani officials believe India has gained influence in the post-Taleban administration, which is dominated by ethnic Tajiks from the anti-Taleban resistance and has little ethnic Pashtun representation.
Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, an MP and senior leader of the Taleban-sympathetic Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam party, cast doubt on the authenticity of the tape. “Who can be sure that it is genuine, because with today’s computer technology it is possible to (have) anyone speaking anything.”
The voice purported to be Al-Zawahri also criticized Musharraf for restricting the flow of Islamic rebels into Indian-held Kashmir, where they have been waging a bloody 14-year insurgency, and for initiating a debate on recognizing Israel. The speaker urged “all Muslims in Pakistan” to close ranks to protect their country from “the crusade allied with the Hindus”.
“Act, O Muslims in Pakistan before you wake up from your slumber to find Hindu soldiers raiding your homes in complicity with the Americans.”
Islamist MP Ahmed said the undated videotape showed that the US had “unjustly shed the blood of thousands of innocent Muslims, because the people they had been hunting are still alive and active”.
Meanwhile, police yesterday named the suspected mastermind of a July attack on a mosque in Quetta that killed 57 people as a relative of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the notorious Al-Qaeda figure convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
They said four suspects were arrested last week but the mastermind, Dawood Badini, remained at large.
