Pakistan yesterday released 11 Iranians detained near the countries’ border amid tensions over a deadly suicide attack in Iran that Tehran alleges has links to Pakistani intelligence officials, police said.
Authorities had first said the 11 were members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, but then reversed course and identified them only as security officers. They were arrested on Monday after shooting out the tires of a car carrying smugglers, Pakistani authorities said.
The arrests threatened to add to the strain between the two nations triggered by the Oct. 18 attack on the Iranian side of the border. They came a day after the Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari met Iran’s interior minister and promised to track down the perpetrators of the blast.
Police official Dadur Rehman said the paramilitary Frontier Corps released the Iranians after an investigation.
“I do not have any idea why they were released,” Rehman said by telephone from the area where the Iranians were held.
He said he had not been privy to the interrogation.
Pakistan has been accused of supporting militant activities in two other neighboring countries — Afghanistan and India — greatly complicating relations with both of them. Strains in its relationship with another regional power would only add to Pakistan’s problems as it battles al-Qaeda and the Taliban within its borders.
One Pakistani official said three senior officers among the detainees probably belonged to Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard.
Iran’s Press TV carried what it described as a statement from the guard condemning the arrests, but saying that the 11 were not its members. The report cited “informed” sources as saying the arrested men were “border guards hunting fuel smugglers [who] accidentally entered Pakistan.”
In an attempt to boost security in the region, Iran put the Revolutionary Guard directly in control of Sistan-Baluchistan province in April. Its officers typically take the lead in any operations on Iran’s border.
The 11 officers were taken into custody in Mashkel district, about 7km from the countries’ border in the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan, paramilitary official Mohammad Naseer Baluch said.
He said they were arrested soon after they shot out the tires of a car driven by “two petty smugglers.”
The Oct. 18 suicide attack killed 15 members of the Revolutionary Guard, including five senior commanders, and at least 27 others in the town of Pishin. Iranian officials blamed a Sunni rebel group known as Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, in the attack.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the guard chief have since publicly accused Pakistan’s intelligence service of supporting Jundallah.
Last week Iranian police chief General Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghadam accused Pakistan of “having a direct responsibility” for the attack.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS