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| Tuesday, 2 March 2004 |
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Pakistan denies deal allowing US to hunt Osama ISLAMABAD, Monday (Reuters) Pakistan flatly denied on Monday a report that it had struck a deal to allow U.S. troops to hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on its territory. "This report has no truth in it and there is no such deal," military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan said. The latest issue of the New Yorker weekly said thousands of U.S. troops would be deployed in a tribal area bordering Afghanistan in return for Washington's support for Islamabad's pardon last month of Abdul Qadeer Khan, a scientist who admitted leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. The article quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying it was "a quid pro quo" deal with Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf. "We're going to get our troops inside Pakistan in return for not forcing Musharraf to deal with Khan." Sultan rejected this, saying: "There are no quid pro quos on issues of national sovereignty. We totally deny it." He said he could not comment on reports that the United States planned to shift an elite commando unit that took part in the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq to hunt for bin Laden. "If the U.S. is shifting a special unit from Iraq into Afghanistan, I have no comment on that, but there is none coming in to Pakistan," he said. Pakistan says it has deployed tens of thousands of troops along its border with Afghanistan to prevent such movements. Last week it said it detained 20 suspects in the South Waziristan tribal region, but none was a key al Qaeda figure. On Saturday Pakistani troops killed at least 11 people they thought were militants when they opened fire on a van in the region. An intelligence official said those killed might not have been militants and the incident was a case of "mistaken fire". |
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