NYT : Pakistan Releases a Man Accused of Aiding Al Qaeda

Pakistan Releases a Man Accused of Aiding Al Qaeda

By SALMAN MASOOD and CARLOTTA GALL | August 21, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 21 — A Pakistani man accused of aiding Al Qaeda and imprisoned for three years, has been released, according to his lawyer, and American officials made clear their dismay at the news on Monday.

The man, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, 28, was released without charge, and suddenly turned up at his home in Karachi Monday morning, his lawyer Babar Awan said. Mr. Khan had been included in a group of missing people who were being held without charge in Pakistan and whose cases came before the Supreme Court on Monday.

Pakistan’s deputy attorney general, Naheeda Mehboob Ilahi, was asked about Mr. Khan’s whereabouts by the court and said he had already been released. Mr. Awan said his office later reached members of Mr. Khan’s family who confirmed he had arrived home. He said he had not yet spoken to his client.

Mr. Khan was arrested in Lahore International Airport in July 2004 during a joint Pakistani-British operation. Soon after his arrest, the Pakistani and American authorities said they had found files on his computer that led to the raising of the terrorism alert level in the United States. He was also accused of acting as a courier for Al Qaeda by receiving messages from Pakistan’s remote border areas and sending them out via the Internet.

Government officials did not explain why Mr. Khan was never charged and so suddenly released. A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, said there might have not been enough evidence to stand up in court. He compared the case to those of inmates from the United States detention center at Guantánamo Bay who have been released without charge after a number of years.

A researcher for the human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, Ali Dayan Hasan, said he had learned that Mr. Khan was quietly released July 24, and it may be that he was no longer useful as a source of information to the law enforcement agencies. He said that he had not seen Mr. Khan but that he was reportedly in good health.

“He is not the first and certainly will not be the last,” he said of Mr. Khan. “They keep these people, sometimes for months, sometimes for a couple of years, and then they let them go. The information that he had, has been processed,” he said.

Mr. Khan’s lawyer, Mr. Awan, said the lack of evidence against his client and the group action taken up by the Supreme Court had probably led to his release.

“He was never charged. Nobody knows under whose custody he was during all this time,” Mr. Awan said in a telephone interview from Lahore today. “He was kept in illegal confinement. He was never produced before any court, and there was no indictment.”

The Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Mohammed Iftikhar Chaudhry, has taken the law enforcement ministries and intelligence agencies to task over the disappearance of hundreds of people since 2001. Many have been held without charge ,and often their families have no information of their whereabouts.

Chief Justice Chaudhry was suspended in March by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf but successfully fought to be reinstated and has returned to pursuing the cases of the disappeared among others since resuming his job July 20.

Pakistan’s Interior Ministry had in earlier hearings denied any knowledge of Mr. Khan, though two ministers and the military spokesman at the time, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, had confirmed his arrest and detention in 2004, Mr. Awan said.

Sheikh Rashid Ahmad was the information minister in 2004, and Faisal Saleh Hayat was the interior minister. Mr. Awan said he told the court at an earlier hearing that these officials had acknowledged the arrest of Mr. Khan at a news conference in 2004.

“The Supreme Court had ruled that if Khan is not unearthed then these three will be responsible,” Mr. Awan said.

Nevertheless, he was surprised at the sudden release of his client. “I was taken by a surprise yesterday when the deputy attorney general told the Supreme Court that he has been released.”

Gonzalo Gallegos, a State Department spokesman, said Monday that the department had no comment for now about the Pakistani action.

It appeared unlikely that the United States would try to take unilateral action to take Mr. Khan into custody. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has on several occasions arrested terrorism suspects in Pakistan and taken them to secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

But those prisons for high-level terrorist suspects have generally been reserved for detainees believed to have intelligence about terrorist plots in the works, not for people like Mr. Khan who have been in custody. Pakistani officials have said that information from Mr. Khan led them to a Tanzanian wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa, which killed more than 200 people, The Associated Press reported.