KABUL, Nov 11: Seventeen Pakistani men held prisoner in Afghanistan for fighting alongside the former Taliban militia were released on Monday after Afghan authorities declared their punishment complete.

“They were Taliban Pakistani prisoners who have been in jail for about a year. Their sentences are finished, so we released them,” an Afghan intelligence official said.

The men, several looking visibly distressed, were paraded briefly before reporters at Afghanistan’s foreign ministry, before being loaded on a bus which officials said would take them to the Pakistan embassy in Kabul.

A spokesman for the Pakistan embassy confirmed the prisoners were handed over, but added that the Pakistani ambassador was not permitting any press access.

“The prisoners are here and we will be sending them back to Pakistan, but I can’t say exactly when they will be returned,” he said.

One of the prisoners, Abdullah Ghafoor, from Kohat district in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, told AFP he had been fighting alongside the Taliban when he was arrested and imprisoned at Kabul’s intelligence directorate.

Another, 50-year-old Mohammad Rafai, said he had been imprisoned since January this year. He gave no further details of his involvement with the Taliban.

Pakistan estimates that some 2,000 of its citizens were arrested for allegedly fighting alongside the Taliban regime and that around 1,000 are still languishing in Afghan jails.

Thousands of Pakistanis, many of them young religious students from remote rural areas, flooded into Afghanistan to support the Taliban, once backed by Pakistan, against a US-backed military coalition which routed the extremists and their Al-Qaeda associates late last year.

Caroline Douilliez, spokeswoman for the International Committee for the Red Cross in Kabul, said she was aware of almost 2,500 prisoners linked to the fighting that were still incarcerated in Afghanistan’s jails.

Afghan authorities have promised to free large numbers of Pakistanis held in their prisons. In September this year 55 men flew to Peshawar as part of a staggered release programme.

Some of the men were reported to have been held for up to six and half years in jails belonging to the anti-Taliban resistance.

Pakistani officials and rights groups have been lobbying Kabul for months to accelerate the prisoner repatriation process, which stalled after the first releases of 233 prisoners in April and May this year.

During a visit to Pakistan earlier this year, Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah called the men “prisoners of war”.

Monday’s release comes a day after 20 women prisoners held without trial for minor breaches of Islamic moral code were freed under orders from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to mark the holy month of Ramazan.—AFP