Pakistan detains officer over militant links

Pakistan on Tuesday announced the arrest of an army brigadier accused of having contacts with a banned militant group. The information was released seven weeks after US Navy SEALs found and killed Osama bin Laden in the military town of Abbottabad, reviving disturbing questions about ignorance or complicity within Pakistan's powerful military. Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas confirmed that the officer had been arrested, but released no further details on which of Pakistan's plethora of banned Islamist militant groups he was alleged to have been in contact with. "One of the brigadiers who we found having contacts with one of the defunct organisations is under detention," Abbas told AFP. "The investigation is on and we follow a zero tolerance policy of any such activity within the army," he added. The spokesman refused to release other details, saying that doing so could jeopardise the investigation to establish "all the facts" but vowed that the military would take "strict disciplinary action" in keeping with its laws. The BBC's Urdu-language service named the officer as Brigadier Ali Khan, saying that he had been working for two years at the army's headquarters in Rawalpindi before disappearing suddenly about one and a half months ago. The report quoted a relative of Khan as saying that he did not return from work on the evening of May 6. When they got in touch with the army, military officers apparently told them that the brigadier had been held for questioning but will soon return home. Since bin Laden was killed, Pakistan has been under increasing pressure from the United States to crack down on militant sanctuaries in its northwestern border areas with Afghanistan and cut all ties with extreme Islamist networks. Western officials have long accused Pakistan's military and its feared Inter-Services Intelligence agency of maintaining links to blacklisted Islamist militant groups to offset the power of arch-rival India. Pakistan has denied those links and points out it has been fighting for years against homegrown Taliban, losing thousands of soldiers, and has arrested senior Al-Qaeda suspects since joining the US-led "war on terror" in late 2001. But relations between Pakistan and the United States nose dived to their worst ever point after the bin Laden raid. The army was humiliated by the perceived violation of sovereignty and the discovery that the world's most-wanted man lived a stone's throw from the country's top military academy.