Mujahid Mohiyuddin in¬sists that he and his district are innocent.
Speaking in his religious seminary, or madrassa, in the Mansehra district of northern Pakistan, the young cleric ad¬mitted receiving military training in 1996 from Harkat-ul¬-Mujahedeen, or Movement for Holy Warriors, a Pakistani group linked to Al Qaida and the killing of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.
But he insisted that the group had disbanded and that training camps no longer operated in the district. “The gov¬ernment has imposed restrictions on the holy war,” he said. “There are not any training camps in the country, especially Mansehra.” During the past year, Taliban prisoners cap¬tured in Afghanistan, opposition politicians in Pakistan and Afghan and Indian government officials have said repeatedly that training camps are active in the Mansehra district and other parts of Pakistan, while Pakistani offi¬cials vehemently deny they exist.
Last summer, a young Pakistani captured with Taliban forces in Afghanistan said in an interview with The New York Times that he was trained in the Mansehra dis¬trict by the group Mohiyuddin said had been disbanded. An armed Pakistani captured in Afghanistan told a private Afghan television channel in June that he had been trained there.
In July, two militants told a Pak¬istani journalist working on con¬tract for The New York Times that they met one of the July 7 London bombing suspects, Shehzad Tan¬weer, on a trip to a militant train¬ing camp in the Mansehra district last winter. Three Pakistanis re¬cently sentenced to prison terms in Afghanistan said they had been trained in the district, an Afghan intelligences official said.
A Pakistani arrested in Afghanistan said he had been trained in the Mansehra dis¬trict. Sher Ali, a 28-year-old night watchman from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province who was caught in July on his way to join the mujahedeen, described his training in an interview in a Kabul jail. Ali described a seemingly under¬ground system in Pakistan that trains fighters and sends them into Afghanistan. He said he met an Afghan at a friend’s house in Miranshah, in Pakistan’s tribal areas of North Waziristan, a lawless mountain region in which Pak¬istan says it has deployed 70,000 troops to hunt for militants.
After receiving directions from the Afghan, he journeyed alone to a camp in the mountains above the Mansehra dis¬trict. “Nowadays they don’t have legal camps,” he said. “I got the feeling it was a very secret place.” He was given direc¬tions and walked for three hours until he came to a small white tent pitched in a clearing. From there, two men took him on foot and he joined a group of 20 Pakistanis. Some, he said, were being trained to fight Indian forces in Kashmir and some were to go to Afghanistan.
NYT News Service