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WASHINGTON, Jan 5: The US military in Afghanistan has taken control of Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the outspoken former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, a senior US official said on Saturday.
The official told Reuters that Zaeef, who was deported by Pakistan to Afghanistan, had become the most senior official of the vanquished Taliban movement now among 307 Taliban and Al-Qaeda “detainees” being held by the American military.
“We have him detained in Afghanistan,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.
The bespectacled 34-year-old ethnic Pakhtoon became famous as the Taliban’s principle voice to the outside world following the Sept 11 attacks on the United States that killed some 3,000 people.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry announced earlier on Saturday that Zaeef had been deported to Afghanistan.
The US military is interrogating the 307 prisoners at Bataan in the Indian Ocean. A number of them are scheduled to be removed under heavy guard this month to a secure jail facility being built at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
SOURCES OF INTELLIGENCE: US officials have said Zaeef and a number of others held by the military could become major sources of intelligence for Washington in a war on terrorism declared after the September attacks.
Another senior US official confirmed on Friday that the military was also holding Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi, a top leader of fugitive Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, in Kandahar — the city in southern Afghanistan that used to be Taliban’s stronghold.
It was not immediately known where Zaeef was being held. The Defense Department said on Saturday that 275 Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants were detained in Kandahar, 21 at Bagram air base near Kabul, two at Mazar-i-Sharif and nine aboard the Bataan.
Although the United States is expected to receive hundreds of additional prisoners from Pakistan and the interim Afghan government in coming weeks, bin Laden and supreme Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar remain at large and are being hunted by American forces in the three-months-old war in Afghanistan.
The United States has not decided who or how many of the detainees might be charged and perhaps put on trial by military courts. But President George W. Bush has vowed to bring to justice those responsible for attacks using hijacked airliners that crashed into the Pentagon, New York City’s World Trade Center and a field in Pennsylvania.—Reuters
Earlier, Intikhab Amir from Peshawar reported that Zaeef was forcefully repatriated to Kandahar late Friday night in a US C-130 aircraft from Peshawar, senior military official sources told Dawn on Saturday.
Mr Zaeef, who was picked up from his Islamabad residence couple of days back, was brought to Peshawar on Friday and was airlifted to Kandahar late in the night.
Earlier, reports were circulating in Peshawar that Mr Zaeef, who had applied for asylum before being taken into custody by the Pakistani secret services, had been deported to Afghanistan from Miramshah, the headquarters of North Waziristan agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
However, senior military sources told this scribe that Mr Zaeef was handed over to the US authorities at Peshawar on Friday night who later transported him to Kandahar.
