By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : US officials have offered no comment on the reported release by Pakistan of a man accused of aiding Al Qaeda, beyond saying that they would continue to work with Islamabad “as a friend and ally”.
“Well, we coordinate closely with the Pakistani government on a host of counter-terrorism and security issues. I don’t have any more information specific to this case,” State Department spokesperson Gonzalo Gallegos said Tuesday.
“However, we’re going to continue to work closely with them as a friend and ally under President (Pervez) Musharraf in our counter-terrorism efforts,” he said, taking the question about the release of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, 28, in Islamabad.
Reporting the release from Islamabad Tuesday, the New York Times said it appeared unlikely that the US would try to take unilateral action to take him into custody.
Since the terror attacks of Sep 11, 2001, the US on several occasions arrested terrorism suspects in Pakistan and taken them to secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, it noted.
But those prisons for high-level terrorist suspects have generally been reserved for detainees believed to have intelligence about terrorist plots in the works, not for people like Khan who have been in custody.
Pakistani officials have said that information from Khan led them to a Tanzanian wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa, which killed more than 200 people, the Times said.
Khan, it said citing his lawyer Babar Awan, was released without charge, and suddenly turned up at his home in Karachi Monday morning. Khan had been included in a group of missing people who were being held without charge in Pakistan and whose cases came before the Supreme Court Monday.
Khan was arrested at the Lahore International Airport in July 2004 during a joint Pakistani-British operation. Soon after his arrest, the Pakistani and American authorities said they had found files on his computer that led to the raising of the terrorism alert level in the US.
He was also accused of acting as a courier for Al Qaeda by receiving messages from Pakistan’s remote border areas and sending them out via the Internet.
Government officials did not explain why Khan was never charged and so suddenly released. A spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, said there might have not been enough evidence to stand up in court.
He compared the case to those of inmates from the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay who have been released without charge after a number of years, the Times reported.