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Islamabad investigates pro-Taliban cleric
AFP - 2 hours 56 minutes ago
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - - Pakistan on Monday began investigating the detained cleric who brokered a failed peace deal that put three million people under sharia law but was shattered by renewed Taliban fighting.
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Maulana Sufi Mohammad, father-in-law of the Taliban cleric who masterminded a two-year uprising that ravaged the once idyllic northwest Swat valley beloved by Western tourists, was arrested on Sunday on the outskirts of Peshawar.
"The federal government has set up an investigation team of security agencies and Sufi Mohammad will be formally charged on the basis of its findings," said Arshad Abdullah, law minister in North West Frontier Province.
"The investigation is under way," he told AFP.
Mian Iftikhar Hussain, provincial information minister, told AFP that Mohammad was arrested with three of his sons.
"His actions so far indicate he still has close ties to the Taliban of Swat. We contacted him four days ago and advised him to stop his activities... (which) showed he was interested in killing people again," Hussain said.
Pakistan last year released Mohammad from a six-year jail term imposed for leading thousands of supporters across the border into Afghanistan to fight against the US-led troops who overthrew the Taliban regime in Kabul in 2001.
Although it has never been clear how much influence Mohammad wields over his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, the elderly cleric brokered a deal to put the three million residents of the northwest Malakand region under Islamic law.
Sharia law was the key demand of Fazlullah's uprising. An initial ceasefire accompanied the February 16 deal -- widely criticised in the West and at home -- but his group refused to disarm as demanded by the government.
When armed Taliban fighters advanced from Swat into the district of Buner, 100 kilometres (60 miles) from Islamabad, Pakistan launched a massive offensive under US pressure to crush Islamists considered a major threat.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said this month that the military had "eliminated" extremists and the government had sent back around 400,000 of the 1.9 million civilians who were displaced by the fighting.
But deadly skirmishes have continued, raising fears that the Taliban merely escaped into the mountains and regrouped, as they did after two previous offensives in Swat, and elsewhere in the militant-infested northwest.
The military said Monday that 11 "terrorists" were killed and about a dozen arrested, including a wanted commander, in Swat and Dir over the last 24 hours.
Last Thursday, the Taliban denied government claims that Fazlullah was wounded, and threatened to unleash renewed holy war.
Residents say Fazlullah's illegal FM radio station still occasionally broadcasts his speeches, although it was not clear when they were recorded.
"I managed to tune in four days ago. The broadcast was about the Islamic way of life and the system of government the country should have," said Mohammad Khalis, a shopkeeper from Kabal district in northern Swat.
Pakistan has offered a 615,000-dollar reward for Fazlullah, captured dead or alive, and 15 of his top lieutenants, but so far none of them has been confirmed arrested or killed since the latest offensive was launched in April.
Fazlullah led thousands of supporters, a mixture of hardcore ideologues and disenfranchised young men, in a brutal campaign that beheaded opponents, burned scores of schools and fought against government troops from November 2007.
His rebellion marked the only time that a district under government control effectively fell into Taliban hands in Pakistan, the country US President Barack Obama has put at the heart of the global fight against Islamist militants.
The North West Frontier Province information minister accused Mohammad of trying to return to Malakand, which would have "disturbed" law and order in the precariously balanced region, which includes Swat, Buner and Dir, where the offensive was concentrated.
Pakistan says more than 1,800 militants and 166 security personnel have been killed since April, but the death tolls are impossible to verify independently.
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