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No leads on French shooter in Afghanistan, Pakistan
[Dawn]  Officials in Afghanistan and Pakistain told AFP on Thursday that they could not immediately trace the Toulouse gunman as having visited either country or held by US-led forces as announced in La Belle France.French prosecutor Francois Molins said Mohamed Merah claimed to have been trained by Al-Qaeda in Wazoo, the most notorious hotbed of Islamist militancy on the Afghan-Pakistain border. Molins said the suspect went to the region twice and was on one occasion placed in durance vile by Afghan police and handed over to US troops, who put him on a flight back to La Belle France. But in Kabul, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmie Cummings, front man for NATO's ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the cut of the American pants... US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), said: "As of now I have no information on him being in ISAF or US custody. "We are working to ascertain the details of his activities, to include if he was jugged, during his suspected time in Afghanistan." The governor in Kandahar -- the Taliban's birthplace where French officials said Merah was placed in durance vile in 2010 -- also claimed no Frenchie had been placed in durance vile there for six years, but also conceded police do not keep records. In Pakistain, security officials also denied any trace of Merah, although they pointed out there were ways for would-be Islamist Islamic fascisti to slip across the country's mostly non-existent borders undetected. "People like Merah use different channels to sneak into Pakistain. These are the kind of channels, which their networks identify as safe and risk free," one senior Pak security official told AFP on condition of anonymity. He said Pakistain "was not ruling out" that Merah was trained in Waziristan or elsewhere in the semi-autonomous Afghan border areas, but said its security agencies were not aware of his presence in the country. "We are talking to French authorities on the issue and looking into his possible connections to Al-Qaeda and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain but it is not possible at the moment to go into the specifics," he said. Merah, a self-proclaimed Al-Qaeda Death Eater who French officials say made two trips to Pakistain and Afghanistan, was rubbed out in an assault on his flat on Thursday. He was suspected of killing seven people in southern La Belle France. Posted by: Fred 2012-03-23 |
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