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Pakistan Hunts for Envoy Missing Near Border With Afghanistan

By admin | February 14, 2008

Pakistan is hunting for its ambassador to Kabul who disappeared four days ago in a tribal region near the Afghan border, the Foreign Office said, adding nobody has claimed responsibility for abducting him.

The government can’t confirm reports that Taliban gunmen seized Tariq Azizuddin and are demanding a top rebel commander be released in exchange, spokesman Muhammad Sadiq told reporters in the capital, Islamabad, yesterday, the official Associated Press of Pakistan reported.

The ambassador was traveling with his driver and security guard to the Afghan capital from Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar when he disappeared in the Khyber district, Sadiq said, adding it was “normal practice” for diplomats to make such a journey by road.

Pakistan has deployed more than 100,000 soldiers in the tribal region to combat Taliban and al-Qaeda gunmen since 2003. The ambassador disappeared on the same day Pakistan’s security forces captured Taliban commander Mansoor Dadullah in the southern province of Baluchistan bordering Afghanistan.

Nobody has contacted Pakistan’s government demanding Dadullah’s released in exchange for the ambassador, Sadiq said.

Dadullah was wanted for his role in attacks on U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization soldiers in neighboring Afghanistan. He is the brother of the late Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban military commander who was killed in May in an operation led by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

U.S. intelligence officials say that al-Qaeda has established a haven in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

Topics: Pakistan News |