Taliban chief Mullah Omar treated in Pakistan: Report

Report says Mullah Mohammed Omar was treated for a heart

attackin Pakistan with the help of its intelligence service.

Tribune

WASHINGTON: The reclusive one-eyed chief of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Mohammed Omar was treated for a heart attack in Pakistan with the help of its intelligence service, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The spiritual leader of the insurgency, who went deep underground after the 2001 US-led invasion, suffered a heart attack on January 7 and was taken to a hospital near Karachi for several days, the Post said, citing a report by a private intelligence network run by former US security officials.

The network, operating as a private company known as “The Eclipse Group,” said its source was an unnamed physician in the hospital. “While I was not personally in the operating theater… my evaluation based on what I have heard and seeing the patient in the hospital is that Mullah Omar had a cardiac catheter complication resulting in either bleeding or a small cerebral vascular incident, or both,” the physician was quoted as saying.

The doctor added that Omar appeared to have suffered some brain damage and had slurred speech following the operation.

The report said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had “rushed him to a hospital in Karachi, where he was given heparin (an anticoagulant) and operated on.” “After 3-4 days of post-operative care in the hospital, he was released to the ISI and ordered to take absolute bed rest when at home for at least several days,” it added.

Official denial

Although Pakistan is officially an ally of the international coalition battling the Taliban in Afghanistan, US officials have long accused the ISI of playing a double game. Pakistan has always strongly denied such charges, and its Washington ambassador Husain Haqqani said the Eclipse report “had no basis whatsoever.”

“Sometimes intelligence tips received by professionals turn out to be wrong. The story about Mullah Omar falls under that category,” he told the Post.

The Post said Eclipse appeared to be “the latest iteration of a shadowy, Pentagon-backed operation that began contracting with former CIA and military operatives to supply intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009.”

The newspaper said it was run by a former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s counterterrorism center, a retired diplomat and a former US army Special Forces information operations specialist in Iraq.

JUI-F's Senate chief whip resigns

Tribune


Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazlur Rehman (JUI-F) resigned from the post of the Chief Whip of the government in the Senate on Friday.
Haideri had been serving in this position from the last two years. However, after the JUI-F decided to break away from the government in the centre, there was pressure on him to resign from his post.
The senator is the third lawmaker of the JUI-F to resign from his position. Earlier, in protest of the sacking of Minister of Science and Technology Azam Khan Swati, the JUI-F had submitted the resignations of two cabinet members to the prime minister including Housing Minister Rehmatullah Kakar and Tourism Minister Maulana Attaur Rehman.
The JUI-F has rejected several reconciliation attempts by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). However the party has decided to not leave the provincial governments in Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan.
Nawaz believes in policy of reconciliation
Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) Chief Mian Nawaz Sharif on Friday telephoned Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to assure him that his party will not become part of any plan to destabilise the government.
Sources informed that the PML-N chief said that his party believes in a policy of reconciliation, after which the prime minister thanked Sharif for his cooperation with the government.
Sharif also called Chief Minister Balochistan Nawab Aslam Raisani to discuss political situation in the back drop of his meetings with Maulana Fazalur Rehman.

ISI denies revealing CIA chief’s identity

Tribune

An official of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has denied that it was responsible for revealing the name of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) top clandestine officer in Pakistan.

“We absolutely deny this accusation, which is totally unsubstantiated and based on nothing but conjecture,” a senior ISI official said in a background briefing at the ISI headquarters in Islamabad, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

The top CIA officer in Pakistan, Jonathan Banks, was removed yesterday after American officials said the CIA had received a number of death threats since being publicly identified in a lawsuit by Karim Khan, who alleged that his brother and son had been killed in a drone strike.

“This organisation has immense tolerance. We have cooperated to the hilt despite constant allegations levelled against us. But this story is the biggest bomb shell,” the official said, referring to the article published in The New York Times on Friday.

Claiming that the allegation had greater implications, the official said that the article seemed “intended to create rifts between the ISI and CIA.”

Some US officials had said that they strongly suspected that operatives of Pakistan’s spy service had a hand in revealing the CIA officer’s identity, possibly in retaliation for a civil lawsuit filed in New York last month implicating the ISI chief in the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008. The ISI officials, in turn, pointedly denied these accusations.

The briefing by two senior officials included a litany of complaints as the officials accused western news organisations of continuously publishing  reports that “cast aspersions on the credibility of the spy organisation.”

Both officials claimed that ISI had an excellent working relationship with their counterparts in the CIA. “We regularly deal with the CIA and it has never communicated to us that they have doubts on our sincerity and credibility,” said one official.” In the briefing, the officials suggested that the conduct of CIA’s top officer might itself have been responsible for blowing the agent’s cover. “Americans have a vast access in Pakistan. They openly interact with civil society members, attend dinners and meetings,” one official said.

Meeting of Malik with Fazal ur Rehman concludes, unsuccessful

Dawn

ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Rehman Malik met with the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-F (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman on Saturday at his residence in Islamabad.

Malik conveyed President Asif Ali Zardari’s message to the JUI-F cheif that the PPP government wants to continue its policy of reconciliation, according to sources.

The purpose of the meeting was to clarify all misunderstandings that emerged after the dismissal of the two ministers, Azam Khan Swati and Hamid Saeed Kazmi.

The JUI-F however plans to submit an application to the National Assembly speaker on Monday to sit in the opposition.