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Militants' training camps in Pakistan's Mansehra

Mujahid Mohiyuddin insists that he and his district are innocent.

Speaking in his religious seminary, or madrasah, in the Mansehra district of northern Pakistan, Mohiyuddin, a young cleric, admitted receiving military training in 1996 from Harkat-ul-Mujahidin, or "Movement for Holy Warriors," a Pakistani group linked to al-Qaeda and the killing of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.

But he insisted that the group had disbanded and that training camps no longer operated in the district. "The government has imposed restrictions on the holy war," he said. "There are not any training camps in the country, especially Mansehra."

This picturesque area of rolling Himalayan foothills, thick forests and isolated farms is the focus of bitter charges that Pakistan continues to allow terrorist training camps to operate on its soil. Over the last year, Taliban prisoners captured in Afghanistan, opposition politicians in Pakistan and Afghan and Indian government officials have said repeatedly that training camps are active in the Mansehra district and other parts of Pakistan, while Pakistani officials vehemently deny they exist.

Last summer, a young Pakistani captured with Taliban forces in Afghanistan said in an interview with the New York Times that he was trained in the Mansehra district by Harkat-ul-Mujahidin, the group Mohiyuddin said had been disbanded.

An armed Pakistani captured in Afghanistan told a private Afghan television channel in June that he had been trained in a camp there.

In July, two militants told a Pakistani journalist working on contract for the New York Times that they met one of the July 7 London bombing suspects, Shehzad Tanweer, on a trip to a militant training camp in the Mansehra district last winter. Three Pakistanis recently sentenced to prison terms in Afghanistan for trying to assassinate the US ambassador said they had been trained in the district, according to an Afghan intelligence official.

Another Pakistani captured in Afghanistan this month said he was trained in the Mansehra district.

Sher Ali, a 28-year-old night watchman from Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province who was caught in July on his way to join the mujahidin, described his training in an interview in a Kabul jail.

The interview took place in an office at the prison on Aug. 14 with no guards present. Ali, described a seemingly underground system in Pakistan that trains fighters and sends them into Afghanistan. He said he met an Afghan at a friend's house in Miranshah, in Pakistan's tribal areas of North Waziristan, a lawless mountain region in which Pakistan says it has deployed 70,000 troops to hunt for militants.

After receiving a letter and directions from the Afghan, he journeyed alone to a camp hidden high in the mountains above the Mansehra district. "Nowadays they don't have legal camps," he said, "I got the feeling it was a very secret place."

He was given directions and walked for three hours until he came to a small white tent pitched in a clearing. From there, two men took him on foot for another hour or two, and he joined a group of 20 Pakistanis. Some, he said, were being trained to fight Indian forces in the disputed region of Kashmir and some were to go to Afghanistan.

There were no buildings, he said, and the men slept on the ground. Their trainer, whom they knew as Maksud, spoke Urdu, he said. "He taught us to use a Kalashnikov and a rocket-propelled grenade," he said. After just three weeks there, he set off for Afghanistan, he said.

But the Afghan police identified him as a Pakistani and detained him.

In southern Afghanistan, a Taliban commander who recently defected to the Afghan government, Mullah Sayed Mir, said that a training program for new recruits was also being conducted in and around the southwestern Pakistani town of Quetta.

"The Taliban have rented houses in Pakistan, they live there and also get training there," he said.
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