NEW YORK, May 3: An Afghan tribal chief facing heroin smuggling charges in New York tried to improve his lot by giving investigators information about the whereabouts of the supreme leader of the Taliban, the government said in court papers.

Bashir Noorzai, chief of the million-member Noorzai tribe, was arrested in April 2005 after federal authorities lured him to the United States with a false promise of safe passage.

In a document dated May 1, prosecutors said that during his initial months in captivity, Noorzai considered cooperating with US authorities and offered information about his connections to Taliban leaders, including Mullah Mohammad Omar.

Noorzai told investigators that the Taliban leader moved daily in the mountains in 2005 to evade detection and communicated in coded language. He also said Mullah Omar travelled with four or five people and sent messages to the Taliban through a brother-in-law, group commander Mullah Azizullah.

Noorzai is scheduled for trial in two weeks on charges that he brought $50 million worth of heroin to the US with the Taliban support. He was arrested after he agreed to travel to the US to provide the government with information on heroin trafficking, relationship to terrorism, and the movement of money in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East. Federal authorities promised him safe passage, only to arrest him anyway.

An indictment charged Noorzai and his group with providing arms and manpower to the Taliban between 1990 and 2004 in exchange for protection of his opium crops, heroin laboratories and drug transportation routes.

In interviews, Noorzai said he got some of his latest information about Mullah Omar’s whereabouts during a February 2005 conversation with Mullah Azizullah, after he spotted him walking on a road in Quetta.—AP