Re: Nawaz Met Regularly with bin laden
Daily Times editorial dated March 20, 2006
Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Osama bin Laden
Talking to the Sunday magazine of a national Urdu daily, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) leader Qazi Hussain Ahmad revealed that he had repeatedly met Osama bin Laden and that the Al Qaeda leader had visited him at Mansoora, the Jamaat headquarters in Lahore. According to him, Osama was willing in 1990 to buy parliamentarians’ loyalties to ensure Nawaz Sharif’s election as prime minister. Bin Laden had said that if there was a way to buy votes, he was willing to pay for them. Qazi said, “He was a big supporter of IJI (Islami Jamhoori Ittehad) and Nawaz Sharif.” He said Bin Laden was also interested in a deal with the JI, which he (Qazi) had declined because he did not agree with Osama’s “methods”. He also said Bin Laden could not have carried out the 9/11 attacks because he lacked the “ability”; he said the Jews had done it, first giving the day off to all Jews working in the World Trade Centre.
The JI has done some “damage control” after the interview, stating that the meetings with Osama bin Laden had taken place when he was based in Peshawar and was allowed to move freely in Pakistan as a fighter against the Soviet Union. The truth, however, is that the meetings relate to the post-1988 period when the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) came to power and was then toppled. The IJI, of which Jamaat-e-Islami was a part, came to power in 1990. This was “facilitated”, according to Air Marshall Asghar Khan’s petition pending at the Supreme Court of Pakistan, by the ISI, which provided “election funds”. The IJI soon split up. One reason for this was Qazi Sahib and his partisanship in favour of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar whom the rest of the Afghan mujahideen despised. It is well known that Qazi Sahib used to invite himself to the meetings prime minister Nawaz Sharif held with the exiled Afghan leaders to ensure that Hekmatyar got a major post in any government-in-exile formed in Islamabad or Peshawar.
Benazir Bhutto too has accused Nawaz Sharif of taking money from Osama bin Laden to oust her from power. Then we had the most extraordinary event of Ramzi Yusuf trying — after his attempt at blowing up the World Trade Centre — to kill her. He failed while the chemicals burnt his hands and he had to be hospitalised. According to reliable sources the attempt (in Karachi) on Ms Bhutto’s life was funded by Khalid Shaikh Muhammad — the man who also funded Al Qaeda’s assault on the World Trade Centre in 2001. When Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was finally caught it was at the house of a JI member. Did the Jamaat have no truck with Al Qaeda, as Qazi Sahib claims?
**Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, then interior minister, had “officially” revealed (Khabrain, August 17, 2004) that one Maluka Khatoon alias Elis, arrested on October 4, 2002, had confessed to having contacts with the Al Qaeda agent Saleh Muhammad. The woman, the wife of a serving DSP, owned the Navidul Islam Trust. The minister had added that both were active members of the JI and that the Trust was headed by a JI member, Shazia Siddiq. Two doctors belonging to the JI were found harbouring a number of Arab women in Karachi. On January 4, 2003, an Australian member of Al Qaeda, named Terry, was arrested from the house of former national hockey player Shahid Ali Khan in Karachi. Mr Khan’s wife was a JI member. On January 28, 2003, Khalid Shaikh Muhammad was arrested in Rawalpindi from the house of a JI member.
Qazi Sahib has waved aside the period when he was in the IJI and enjoyed far more political leverage with prime minister Nawaz Sharif than was his due (because of the ISI?) but according to Air Marshall Asghar Khan he was one of the recipients of funds from the ISI and deeply involved in its efforts to bring the IJI into power. His Jamaat-e-Islami received Rs 5 million. Another JI leader Liaquat Baloch is said to have separately received Rs 1.5 million in the run-up to the 1990 elections — rigged in favour of the IJI and Nawaz Sharif. An interesting “corroborating” statement came from one recipient, Fakhruddin G Ebrahim, who confirmed having received Rs 200,000 for defending General Aslam Beg against a contempt of court charge (PLD 1993 SC310).**
We all know that Qazi Sahib and a number of other MMA leaders have written articles “proving” that 9/11 was not Al Qaeda’s doing but that of the Jews. That the Jews were given an “off day” on 9/11 is also a well known defence of Al Qaeda but the lists posted on the Internet as “Americans killed” feature a lot of names that are clearly Jewish. Osama bin Laden himself has not denied responsibility; in fact he has boasted about it in his famous Jalalabad tape — “the mother of all smoking guns”. The tape has him saying that when his lieutenants asked him to come and see the destruction of the World Trade Centre live on TV he refused and kept listening to the radio, rather bemused by the fact that more than the four floors that he had predicted had come down!
That is also what a Pakistani journalist who nearly became the author of Osama’s “authorised” biography, has to say. Columnist Hamid Mir wrote in Jang (November 1, 2004) that by announcing that he had carried out the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden had exposed the error of many Muslim intellectuals and ulema who had been arguing that the 9/11 acts of terrorism had been committed by the Jews. In the beginning Mr Mir too thought that the Jews had done it but in November 2001 when he was in Jalalabad he discovered that all Al Qaeda members had a photo of Muhammad Ata (the leader of the hijackers who crashed two airliners into the World Trade Centre buildings) on their laptop computers.