Man bypasses airport security, sneaks in weapon

* Mehmoodul Hassan was carrying disassembled handgun in luggage
* Passenger says airports around the world have scanners to detect weapons
* ASF claims such technology not available to them

Staff Report

LAHORE: A man managed to sneak a disassembled handgun right up to the domestic flight counter at the Allama Iqbal International Airport on Sunday, despite the tall claims of elaborate security measures put in place by the Airport Security Force (ASF).

Mehmoodul Hassan was scheduled to Karachi onboard Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight PK 315 at 7am. He arrived at the airport at 6am, nearly an hour early. However, after he made it past initial checking, security staff deputed at the luggage scanners discovered the dismantled parts of handgun of Spanish make in his luggage. According to airport sources, the parts were spread out in the man’s luggage.

This is the second incident of its kind reported at the Lahore aiport. On February 19, Farhan Saeed Butt, a passenger on Karachi-bound PIA flight PK 317, was stopped for body search at the first checking counter, where security personnel discovered a Japanese pen pistol concealed in his trousers.

This latest incident raises fresh questions about the effectiveness of the security measures in place at the airport. Talking to Daily Times, passenger Muhammad Talha, a UK-based Pakistani businessman, said, “The number of visitors and tourists coming to Pakistan is steadily diminishing due to the growing number of terrorist attacks. They feel unsafe coming here, because most people enter the country through its airports.”

When asked how he would reconcile added security with the inconveince to passengers that would result if security personnel began checking each and every person who came into the airport, he said “At airports around the world, high-tech scanners are used to detect any kind of weapon or explosives without having to stop individuals or vehicles. Scanners can be installed here (at the Lahore airport) as well… nothing is more important for us than security right now.” A senior ASF official told Daily Times that metal and explosive detectors were installed at the entry points to the airports, but the equipment currently available was inadequate when it came to detecting disassembled weapons. “For such detailed checking, we need high-tech scanners in the parking… that technology is currently not available in Pakistan… we will definitely install these scanners at the three main airports as soon as we get them.”

ASF had tightened security at the airport after the attack on Tipu Truckanwala, when the killer had managed to carry a handgun into the parking lot. At the time, ASF had said the that weapon could not be detected in spite of the thorough checking that each incoming vehicle is subjected to.

What ‘Punjabi’ Taliban?

By Ahmed Quraishi

South Waziristan is an Indian outpost on Pakistani soil with a religious version of Mukti Bahini in place, the terror militia created by India in 1969 before its full-fledged and unprovoked invasion of East Pakistan two years later. The similarity is in using proxies. This is not an outlandish theory but an emerging fact anchored in hundreds of pieces of information and intelligence that Pakistani security forces have gathered from the western strip of Pakistan stretching from Balochistan and all the way to the tribal agencies in the north.

To simplify this, let’s start with the series of attacks on Lahore in the past fifteen months. Attacking Pakistan’s military and attacking Lahore has been an old Indian obsession. The link was first made by Indian analysts associated with Indian military and intelligence. They theorized that since Pakistan’s military is mostly drawn from Punjab province, it only makes sense that the best way to punish it for involvement in occupied Kashmir is to attack that part of Pakistan where the families of Pakistani military officers live. Indian propagandists have long been promoting this flawed line of thinking. Explaining Pakistan in lingo-ethnic terms is something New Delhi turned into an art form after 1971. That’s when it successfully exploited this lingo-ethnic card to invade East Pakistan. Our Indian friends later took the same idea to Soviet Moscow to encourage them to meddle in Balochistan and NWFP using Afghan soil.

But after 9/11, this flawed theory was taken by the Indians to a new place: Washington, along with the ideas of independent Balochistan, Pashtunistan and the alleged ‘lingo-ethnic’ divide in Pakistan. Some US powerbrokers took fancy to this theory. To cut a long story short, that’s how US media’s anti-Pakistan bias in the past five years was heavily tinged with this Indian theory on Pakistan. It is also one way of explaining why Afghanistan gradually turned into an anti-Pakistan territory and India was empowered at Pakistan’s expense despite being celebrated by US officials as a ‘major non-NATO ally.’

It is interesting to see an overlap between this Indian security mindset and the TTP. This so-called Pakistani Taliban group attacks the same targets today that New Delhi’s security establishment has been focused on for decades: the army and Lahore.

‘Punjabi Taliban’ is another misnomer that serves the same agenda of forcing Pakistanis to see one another through lingo-ethnic glasses. There is no such thing in Pakistan. Those Pakistanis who volunteered with the Afghan Taliban or with Kashmiri freedom groups during the 1990s came from all linguistic backgrounds [Punjabi, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Pashtun, Urdu-speaking, and Balochs]. To lump all of them together in one ‘Punjabi’ Taliban is wrong and malicious.

It is also part of the indirect desire to attack the geographic position of the Punjab province, where much of Pakistan’s strategic installations and military units are based. It would also mean taking the war to the heart of Pakistani military’s base as defined by the Indians who see it as Punjab-focused.

Pakistan’s political and military leaders should tell their friends in Washington that freezing the expansion in India’s role in Afghanistan is not enough. It should be accompanied by a cleansing within US policymaking circles to remove the poisonous Indian theories on Pakistan that so many within the US academia and media have embraced. Washington should understand that strategies such as inserting pro-US elements into power in Islamabad to contain Pakistan from within won’t work. A better course of action is to genuinely understand and respect Pakistani strategic concerns and interests and work with them, not covertly undermine them when the time is right and grudgingly accept them when the tides are rough.

Pakistanis will also have to understand that they will pay a heavy price for insisting on securing their own interests in the region. And it’s not hard to identify the culprits. India won’t just roll over with punches. And there are lobbies in Washington that won’t simply let go of Afghanistan after experiencing the sweet taste of regional imperialism.

All terror in Pakistan is linked to South Waziristan, where Pakistanis are recruited, brainwashed and then used to kill other Pakistanis. South Waziristan has been turned into Pakistan’s Tibet or Xinjiang. Our strategists understand this. It is time for our public opinion to see this reality without the distortions created by the multimillion dollar media campaigns by foreign governments that want us to see our problems through their eyes.

The writer works for Geo television. Email: aq@ahmedquraishi.com

Indian minister for higher level talks with Pakistan

By Mariana Baabar

CHANDIGARH: Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Parneet Kaur says the only way forward between Pakistan and India is talks and as responsible people they should go further up (from the bureaucratic level) but it was difficult to say how and when the talks would be taken further up.

“It has been the initiative of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that India was willing to take an extra mile. He means it. We simply cannot wish our geography away. For prosperity in Asia, we have to have good relations which would be good for economy as well. Of course, the only way forward is talks but I cannot now say, when or how, would the thread be taken up from where the two foreign secretaries left,” Parneet Kaur told The News, when asked if Prime Minister Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani would meet on the sidelines of the nuclear summit in Washington and later at the Saarc summit in Bhutan.

Parneet Kaur was addressing a special session of a seminar in Chandigarh, on “Cooperate Development, Peace and Security: Women Guiding the Destiny of South Asia” at the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmud Qureshi has in the past also visited and spoken at this centre.

The foreign participants brought up the issue of the strict Indian visa regime where one participant from Sri Lanka voiced her concern to the minister, saying Sri Lanka gave Indians visa on arrival, while she as an honourable citizen had to spend time every day for police reporting in India. She appeared disappointed and said this should be reciprocal for both countries.

The minister expressed her ignorance when asked why when Pakistanis filling visa forms, they had to fill in a “religion” column specially when India professed that it was a secular state. She was frank to admit the external affairs ministry was besieged with visa requests, especially from Pakistan and that “this was a problem”. But looking ahead, she said if the Berlin Wall could come down, maybe in the future Saarc would adopt the EU model where one visa would allow travel in all Saarc countries.

The minister said her ministry was also going through a transformation where the ministries website would also have the Urdu and Arabic versions of the press releases and statements, which would also be SMS to the media as well. The News understands the public diplomacy wing in the external affairs ministry was now including the domestic audience in matters on foreign policy. Issues of foreign affairs are now being debated the length and breath of India to gauge the internal response from a domestic audience.

Earlier, HK Dua, Editor-in-Chief of the Tribune and member of the Rajya Sabha, speaking at the seminar said: “There are mental boundaries between us which need to be broken. I do not understand why correspondents from India and Pakistan cannot be posted in both the countries and what is the security threat in selling newspaper of India in Pakistan and vice-versa?”

He said different procedures to try to bring people across the borders had not succeeded because of attitudes of governments and these procedures were creating divides, which harm the cause of bringing people closer.

British pair faces jail time in Dubai over kiss

REUTERS

A British pair caught kissing in public in Dubai face up to a month in jail in the Gulf Arab emirate for indecency after an Emirati mother complained her child had seen their indiscretion.

The pair, a British man living in Dubai and a female friend, were arrested in November on accusations of kissing and touching each other intimately in public and consuming alcohol, their lawyer said. They were ordered jailed for a month.

The case is the third time in under two years in which Britons have hit the headlines by falling foul of decency laws in Dubai, a flashy Muslim emirate popular with sun-seeking Western tourists and expatriates.

A lawyer for the pair, who launched an appeal on Sunday, said there had been no inappropriate kissing and the two were just friends. A verdict in the appeal is expected on April 4.

“There was no lip kissing. It was just a normal greeting that is not considered offensive,” lawyer Khalaf al-Hosani told the court, adding the complainant’s testimony was contradictory.

The British man’s mother in London said her son, Ayman Najafi, had vowed to clear his name.

“My Ayman is a good boy, he’s very wise and mature. I can’t believe it,” his mother Maida Najafi was quoted as saying in The Independent. “He knows the rules over there. He would never do that. He wouldn’t even do it over here.”

The pair, free on bail, were also fined 1,000 dirhams ($NZ387) for illegal consumption of alcohol, the lawyer said. They were to be deported after the completion of their jail sentence.

Dubai’s foreign population has expanded rapidly in recent years as expatriates flocked to the Gulf Arab trade and tourism hub for its tax-free earnings and year-round sunshine.

The changes have challenged the Emirati population, which is now vastly outnumbered by foreigners, raising concern that their emirate’s rapid pace of growth is a threat to their social and religious identity in what remains a deeply conservative region.

In a high-profile case in 2008, a British couple narrowly escaped jail after a court found them guilty of engaging in drunken sexual activity out of wedlock, and for doing so in public on a beach in the emirate.

They were sentenced to three months in prison followed by deportation, but had their jail terms overturned on appeal.

In a separate case this year, a British couple who shared a hotel room managed to escape trial in Dubai for having sex out of wedlock by producing a marriage certificate.

18 Taliban killed in Orakzai

* Jets target six hideouts in Upper and Lower Orakzai
* Houses owned by two Taliban commanders and used as training centres also destroyed

HANGU: At least 18 Taliban were killed on Sunday when fighter jets bombed their hideouts in Orajzai Agency on Sunday, according to government officials.

The political administration officials told Daily Times that PAF jets targeted six Taliban hideouts in Upper and Lower Orakzai. The Reuters news agency quoted a government official as saying that three of the hideouts had been destroyed. “They carried out intense bombings and precisely targeted militant hideouts,” he said.

The AFP news agency reported that houses owned by two commanders had also been destroyed. An administrative official said the houses were also being used as “training centres”.

A government girls’ high school was also damaged in the bombing.

Locals said the government was preparing for a “grand operation” against the Taliban in the agency, as additional troops had been deployed at in Lower Orakzai and security forces had sealed off all main routes leading to Orakzai Agency. A military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the shelling.

Orakzai is the base of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan chief Hakimullah Mehsud, who officials believe was killed in a US drone strike early this year. The group insists he is alive, but has not provided any evidence.

Pakistan has, in the last year, significantly increased operations against the Taliban in the tribal belt, which Washington has branded an Al Qaeda “headquarters” and “the most dangerous region on earth”.

The rugged tribal terrain became a stronghold for hundreds of extremists who fled neighbouring Afghanistan after the US-led invasion in late 2001. Washington says the Taliban use the semi-autonomous tribal belt to plot and stage attacks in Afghanistan, where more than 120,000 NATO and US troops are helping Afghan forces battle the group.

The airstrikes on Sunday came after a week of bombings which killed scores of people – including soldiers, policemen and aid workers – in Pakistan. On Saturday, a suicide bomber killed 13 people at a security checkpoint in the Swat valley, and earlier on Friday, twin suicide bombings at Lahore’s RA Bazaar killed more than 50 people and injured scores of others.