Pakistan’s envoy to Afghanistan, Tariq Azizuddin, who went missing in February, appeared on Saturday in a video aired by al-Arabiya news channel in which he said that he was held by the Taliban.
”We were on our way to Afghanistan in our official car on February 11 when we were kidnapped in the region of Khybe r… by the mujahedin [holy warriors] of the Taliban,” said Azizuddin, according to an Arabic translation accompanying the video aired by the Dubai-based channel.
The Pakistani envoy said that he was held with his driver and bodyguard, and that they were living ”in comfortable conditions and are looked after”. Two men who appeared to be the other hostages sat next to Azizuddin, while three gunmen stood in the background.
”We have no problems. But I suffer health problems, like blood pressure and heart pain,” said the bespectacled envoy who had a well-kept beard and appeared sitting on the ground in a hilly area dotted with shrubs.
Azizuddin called upon his government and Pakistan’s envoys in Iran and China ”to do all they can to protect our lives and to answer all the demands of the mujahedin of Taliban in order to secure our release”.
The envoy disappeared while driving back to the Afghan capital, Kabul, from Islamabad following a conference of Afghanistan’s donors in Tokyo. The militants of Taliban are active in the tribal region where he went missing.
The chief administrative official in Khyber, Rasool Khan Wazir, said on the day that Azizuddin disappeared that security forces had seen the envoy’s car driven at speed through a check post with ”local people sitting in the front seat”.
The day of his kidnap coincided with Pakistani security forces seizing the senior Taliban commander, Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, in the south-western Baluchistan province, also bordering Afghanistan.
Pakistani forces have fought increasingly fierce battles against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in the tribal belt since 2003.
The Taliban who took power in Afghanistan in 1996 were ousted by a US-led invasion in November 2001, shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda’s chief Osama bin Laden, who operated in Taliban’s Afghanistan and whom the Taliban refused to hand over to the Americans. — AFP
