KARACHI: Noted religious scholar Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani has alleged that the infamous American agency Blackwater is responsible for the gory incidents of Karachi.
Addressing a news conference along with Mufti Muhamamd Taqi, Mufti Muhammad Naeem, Maulana Tanvir ul Haq Thanvi and traders here on Wednesday, Mufti Rafi Usmani said that Blackwater is involved in the killing of innocent people at the Muharram procession.
Immediately after the blast, markets were set on fire according to a well thought-out plan, he said, inquiring how could the miscreants get petrol and weapons so early.
He …

SLAMABAD: The Capital police have arrested 35 people belonging to banned organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, including their key leaders, and booked them under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), police said. The activists of the banned group were busy in a secret meeting at a house in F-8/3 when the police raided the place on the information of an intelligence agency.
Highly-educated people, including computer engineers, educational institutions’ head, businessmen, telecom engineers, students of different institutions, environment scientists, civil engineers and an officer of a US-Aid project were among the arrested activists of the …

Yesterday, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik angrily insisted, as his government so often has in recent months, that there are absolutely no Blackwater forces operating inside the country, nor have there ever been.
The claims have long been scoffed at by Pakistani journalists, noting that retired CIA officials have been very open with the fact that they were using Blackwater security at an air base they have been using inside Pakistan to launch drone attacks.
What’s more, locals in the Pakistani city of Peshawar have been complaining for months about rude mercenaries …

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Pakistani police detained 30 suspected members of the outlawed Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir on Saturday in a raid on a house in the capital, a police officer said.
“They were holding a secret meeting in the house. We’re investigating,” said Islamabad police officer Afzal Shah.
The London-based Hizb ut-Tahrir seeks to unite Muslims in a pan-Islamic state but says its means are peaceful.
Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf banned the group several years ago.

ISLAMABAD: The US embassy has been found involved in importing sophisticated weapons to Pakistan without the permission and knowledge of the authorities here.
The Foreign Office and the Commerce Ministry denied having authorised the US or any other foreign mission to import huge quantity of weapons. However, the fact remains that the US embassy in Islamabad has brought to Pakistan at least two consignments of modern weapons during this year.
The Foreign Office, which is the main coordinating federal agency in any such deal of foreign missions, and the Commerce Ministry, which …

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Britain is to help Pakistan set up a national security authority and beef up the capacity of its law enforcing agencies to fight terrorism, a British government minister said on Tuesday.
Pakistan is fighting al Qaeda-linked militants who have carried out numerous attacks on its security forces, government and foreign targets in recent years.
At the same time, Britain is worried that radicalised young British men of Pakistani descent can come to Pakistan and make contact with militant groups, get training and develop plots.
British Home Secretary (interior minister) Alan …

As American troops move deeper into southern Afghanistan to fight Taliban insurgents, U.S. officials are expressing new concerns about the role of fugitive Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and his council of lieutenants, who reportedly plan and launch cross-border strikes from safe havens around the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta.
But U.S. officials acknowledge they know relatively little about the remote and arid Pakistani border region, have no capacity to strike there, and have few windows into the turbulent mix of Pashtun tribal and religious politics that has turned the area into …

The foreign ministers of Pakistan and India, meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York at the weekend, did not agree on the resumption of formal talks between the countries.
However, their meeting – the first high-level contact between the countries since July – sets the stage for Washington-mediated backchannel talks for which Pakistan has already appointed a senior envoy, Riaz Mohammad Khan.
The central issues in this dialogue will be the regional “war on terror” and the establishment of a “fair bargain” between India and …

The United States is threatening to launch airstrikes on Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership in the Pakistani city of Quetta as frustration mounts about the ease with which they find sanctuary across the border from Afghanistan.
The threat comes amid growing divisions in Washington about whether to deal with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan by sending more troops or by reducing them and targeting the terrorists.
This weekend the US military was expected to send a request to Robert Gates, the defence secretary, for more troops, as urged by General Stanley …