1 Mar 2009,
NEW DELHI: One of the top bosses of Pakistan's intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has held talks with Osama bin Laden’s key aides in Miram Shah in Pakistan’s restive federal administered tribal Area, according to Times Now. ( Watch )
In fact, highly placed intelligence sources told Times Now that around the time when Pakistan’s foreign minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi was visiting Washington and meeting officials of the Barack Obama administration and reaffirming Pakistan's determination to fight terrorism, a senior ISI official of the rank of a major-general no less was meeting Sirajuddin Haqqani considered an ally of the Taliban as also al-Qaida chief Laden.
Sources said that the subject of discussion in the meeting was the shifting of Haqqanis operations from North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan to Afghanistan in exchange for ceasefire with Pakistan army and to halt military operations if the Haqqanis moves their operations from the NWFP into Afghanistan. Another topic was the construction of the Khost-Gardez road being built by Indian company in Afghanistan. The ISI urged Haqqanis to sabotage efforts by the Indian government to help Afghanistan government to build the Khost-Gardez road.
The meeting assumes significance because the Haqqanis are not ordinary players but hold a great deal of influence in the region and can dictate the course of the war on terror in the region. Jalaluddin Haqqani and Sirajuddin Haqqani are Pashtun warlords and military leaders with links to Taliban and Laden. Haqqanis have been accused by the coalition forces of carrying out the late-December 2008 bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan at an Afghan elementary school near an Afghan barracks that killed several schoolchildren, an Afghan soldier, and an Afghan guard; no coalition or USA personnel were affected. They are also supposed to have facilitated the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. Haqqanis were also linked to Maulvi Jabbar suspect in IC-814 hijacking.
Haqqanis are linked to Maulvi Jabbar of the Peshawar Shura who was in touch with the hijackers of the IC-814 in 1999. Haqqani is the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the most feared Afghan commanders, who fought against the Soviet occupation during the 1980s. Jalaluddin, now aged and in failing health, lives in Khost and has passed the reigns of the Haqqani terror network on to his second son, Sirajuddin. Jalaluddin Haqqani once had strong ties with the CIA, according to published accounts. But now he and his son are wanted men. The US military has placed a bounty of $200,000 on Sirajuddin Haqqani's head.
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