CHAMAN, 25 January 2004 — Pakistani security forces yesterday arrested a former Afghan Taleban governor, a close aide of the militia’s leader Mulla Omar, officials said.
Security forces seized Moulvi Abdul Mannan Khawajazai as he stepped out of a car in the border town of Chaman in the country’s southwest, an official who asked not to be named told reporters.
He said intelligence agencies had been chasing Khawajazai for several days after learning he was in the southwestern border area of Pakistan.
A Taleban spokesman said Khawajazai had been close to the movement’s supreme leader Omar and was the former governor of the western Afghan province of Badghis.
A Pakistani intelligence source said Khawajazai used to manage the Taleban’s financial matters. It was not immediately clear whether Khawajazai would be handed over to the United States like fellow Taleban members arrested in Pakistan and now in detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Pakistani officials say more than 500 Taleban and Al-Qaeda members have been handed over to the US authorities since a crackdown on militancy started following Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
US and Afghan forces have yet to arrest Omar, or Osama Bin Laden, chief of Al- Qaeda network blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Meanwhile, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf yesterday called for the deployment of up to 30,000 international troups to keep the peace in Afghanistan, nearly double the current number.
At a breakfast with reporters outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Musharraf said that Afghanistan had about a dozen centers of power run by warlords since the ouster of the Taleban more than two years ago.
“I feel there is a requirement for a force at each of these places,” said the Pakistani leader, whose country shares a border with Afghanistan where members of the Taleban and the terror network Al-Qaeda are believed entrenched.
He said that “25,000 maximum, maybe 30,000 is enough to do militarily what I think needs to be done.” The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, now commanded by NATO, currently comprises some 6,000 men, while 10,500 US troops are still in the country following up their move to remove the Taleban.
