Islamists in Pakistan on Thursday poured cold water on calls purportedly by al-Qaeda’s number two to rise up against President Pervez Musharraf for ”selling Muslims’ blood in Afghanistan”.
The calls were broadcast by the al-Jazeera television network in an audiotape allegedly carrying the voice of Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in the global terror network.
Pakistan’s largest Islamic party Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), embroiled in a protracted political battle with Musharraf over his unelected presidency and sweeping powers, rejected the exhortations.
”Myself and my party do not endorse Zawahri’s views. We are trying to reform Pakistan’s internal matters in our own way,” JI senator Khurshid Ahmed said.
”We have differences with Musharraf’s policies, but we are not working to launch a coup against him. We are striving tobring change through a political struggle.”
The audiotape was aired along with a videotape showing al-Zawahri with bin Laden in an undetermined mountain location.
Al-Jazeera said the videotape was probably recorded in late April or early May, but the recording carried no indication of the date.
The speaker on the audiotape exhorted Pakistanis to avenge Musharraf’s support of the United States-led overthrow of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in late 2001 for harbouring Bin Laden, and Pakistan’s arrests of about 500 al-Qaeda suspects.
”We ask our Muslim brethren in Pakistan: until when will you put up with the traitor Musharraf, who sold the Muslims’ blood in Afghanistan and handed over the Arab Mujahedin to crusader America?” the speaker said.
”Had it not been for his treason, the surrogate government would not have been installed in Kabul, that government which brought the Indians to Pakistan’s western borders.”
Many Pakistani officials believe India has gained influence in the post-Taliban administration, which is dominated by ethnic Tajiks from the anti-Taliban resistance and has little ethnic Pashtun representation.
Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, an MP and senior leader of the Taliban-sympathetic Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam party, cast doubt on the authenticity of the tape.
”Who can be sure that it is genuine, because with today’s computer technology it is possible to [have] anyone speaking anything.” — Sapa-AFP