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Pakistan test-fires new missile

Pakistan successfully test-fired a long-range ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead yesterday, the military said.

The Shaheen-2 missile was launched from an undisclosed location and has a range of 2,000km. The military said the missile has the capability to carry conventional and non-conventional warheads.

Yesterday’s launch was witnessed by new Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani, who congratulated the scientists and engineers for “achieving an important milestone in Pakistan’s quest for sustaining strategic balance in South Asia,” the military said in a statement.

It quoted Gilani as saying that the defense needs of the country would remain a “high priority” for his elected government.

Yesterday’s test came about two months after Pakistan test-fired a short-range Ghazanvi missile with a range of 290km.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s envoy to Afghanistan Tariq Azizuddin, who went missing in February, appeared yesterday in a video aired by Al-Arabiya news channel in which he said that he was being 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 Khyber ... by the mujahidin [holy warriors] of the Taliban,” said Azizuddin, according to an Arabic translation accompanying the video.

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.”

“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 Mujahedeen 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 the 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 security forces had seen the envoy’s car at a checkpost 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 Baluchistan Province, also bordering Afghanistan.
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