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Pakistan releases senior Taliban commander: official

Pakistan has released its most senior Afghan Taliban detainee, Abdul Ghani Baradar, a senior official of the interior ministry told AFP, in a move Kabul hopes will encourage peace talks with the insurgents.

taliban_abdul_ghani_baradar.jpg
Abdul Ghani Baradar.

"Yes Baradar has been released," Omar Hamid, a spokesman for interior ministry told AFP, without elaborating.

   

Abdul Ghani Baradar, a one-time military chief often described as the insurgents' former second-in-command, was the most high profile detained  Taliban commander in Pakistan.

   

Pakistan's foreign ministry on Friday said that Baradar's release will facilitate Afghanistan's reconciliation process with the Taliban as a NATO combat mission there winds down.

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"In order to further facilitate the Afghan reconciliation process, the detained Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, would be released tomorrow (Saturday)," the foreign ministry had said in a statement.

   

The Afghan government has long demanded that Islamabad free Baradar, whose arrest in January 2010 saw Pakistan accused of sabotaging initiatives to bring peace in war-torn Afghanistan.

   

He was arrested in Pakistan's southern port city of Karachi, reportedly in a secret raid by CIA and Pakistani agents, in an operation that was described as a huge blow to the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan until a US-led invasion in 2001.

   

At the time of his arrest Baradar was reported to have been the Taliban's second-in-command, the right hand man of the Afghan Taliban's supreme commander Mullah Omar.

   

He was the most senior member of the Taliban held after US-led troops invaded Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, bringing down the Islamist regime.


2 min read

Published

Updated

Source: AFP



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