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September 11 terrorists had links
with ISI: Analyst

Lieutenant General Mahmoud Ahmad, who was shunted out of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence as its chief, would appear to be a victim of the intelligence agency's dangerous game plan of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, according to a Canadian security analyst.

Gen Ahmad, a "US appointee", was talking to officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon, while the ISI allegedly had contacts with the September 11 terrorists, Michel Chossudovsky wrote in a research paper The Role of Pakistan's Military Intelligence in the September 11 attacks.

Intelligence inputs said that $100,000 was wired to hijacker Mohammad Atta from Pakistan at Gen Ahmad's instance, though as the head of the ISI since 1999, he was in liaison with his US counterparts in the CIA, Defence Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, Chossudovsky said.

She quoted reports suggesting that the September 11 attacks "were not an act of individual terrorism organised by a separate Al Qaeda cell, but rather they were part of a coordinated military-intelligence operation, emanating from the ISI".

Ahmad, who was in the US during the terror strike holding meetings with his counterparts at the CIA and Pentagon, "as head of the ISI was serving US foreign policy interests. His dismissal on the orders of Washington was not the result of a fundamental political disagreement", she wrote.

Chossudovsky quoted reports about links between Ahmad and Atta and said these also indicated that other ISI officials might have had contacts with the terrorists.

The Canadian analyst said the reports "also shed light on the nature of Gen Ahmad's business activities in the US during the week prior to September 11, raising the distinct possibility of ISI contacts with Mohammad Atta".

Stating that the existence of the ISI-Osama-Taliban axis and also the links between the ISI and the US government were "matters of public record", she said, "While Ahmad was talking to US officials at the CIA and the Pentagon, the ISI allegedly had contacts with the September 11 terrorists."

Earlier, sources said that Ahmad had been forced to quit after the Federal Bureau of Investigators established credible links between him and Umer Sheikh, one of the three militants released in exchange for passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999.

PTI

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