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Pakistan arrests former top Taliban figure: security official
AFP - 59 minutes ago
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - - Pakistan has arrested a former senior Taliban figure who was released by Afghanistan in 2007 in exchange for a kidnapped Italian journalist, a senior security official said Saturday.
Ustad Mohammad Yasir was detained on Thursday in the northwestern city of Peshawar, on the edge of Pakistan's lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, the official told AFP.
Yasir once served as a spokesman for fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar after his hardline regime was ousted from power in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001.
In August 2005, Pakistan had arrested Yasir and transferred him to Afghan custody, but he was released along with four other Taliban in exchange for the freedom of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo in March 2007.
The United States and other countries criticised both the Afghan and Italian governments for agreeing to the prisoner exchange, with some saying such agreements could prompt extremists to carry out more kidnappings.
Yasir was the former political assistant to Abdur Rab Rasool Sayyaf, chief of the Ittehad-i-Islami rebel group that battled the decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
But he switched sides to join the Taliban when Sayyaf formed an alliance with the US-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The Pakistani official said Yasir's real name was Ustad Zumarck, and that he had also been a professor at Kabul University.
Pakistan -- which once backed the Taliban regime in Kabul -- switched sides in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, becoming a key US ally in the "war on terror".
Hundreds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists fled into Pakistan's tribal areas on the Afghan border after the fall of the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001.
Officials in Washington and Kabul have repeatedly criticised Islamabad, saying it is not doing enough to crack down on militants who cross the border to attack US and NATO troops deployed in Afghanistan.
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Pakistani policemen make way for an ambulance in Peshawar in November 2008. Pakistan has arrested a former senior Taliban figure who was released by Afghanistan in 2007 in exchange for a kidnapped Italian journalist, a senior security official said Saturday.
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