From: EurasiaDigest (digest@eurasianet.org)
Date: Tue Feb 21 2006 - 09:56:50 EST
ISLAMABAD SAYS IT RECEIVED NO LIST OF TALIBAN WANTED BY AFGHAN GOVERNMENT
Pakistan has denied reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai presented Islamabad with a list of wanted members of Al-Qaeda when he visited Pakistan recently, the state news agency Associated Press of Pakistan reported on 20 February. Pakistani Foreign Office spokeswoman Tasneen Aslam told a weekly news briefing in Islamabad on 20 February that "the Interior Ministry had also confirmed that it had not received any such list before the arrival" of Karzai or during "his visit." During Karzai's three-day visit to Pakistan, which began on 15 February, a spokesman for the Afghan president said that Kabul handed over to Islamabad a list of 150 Taliban members allegedly living in Pakistan (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 17 February 2006). "So far we have not been able to confirm to whom this list was handed over and whether there was such a list," AFP quoted Aslam as saying. While Afghan officials say the list related to Taliban members living in Pakistan, Pakistani officials have in their comments referred primarily to A
l-Qaeda members. Karzai was in Pakistan primarily to voice his concern over the recent increase in violence in Afghanistan, for which authorities in Kabul hold Islamabad partly responsible. AT
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