Is the sky blue? The Pope Catholic?Mujahid Mohiyuddin insists that he and his district are innocent.
Speaking in his religious seminary, or madrassa, in the Mansehra district of northern Pakistan, the young cleric admitted receiving military training in 1996 from Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, or Movement for Holy Warriors, a Pakistani group linked to Al Qaeda and the killing of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.
But he insisted that the group had disbanded and that training camps no longer operated in the district. "The government has imposed restrictions on the holy war," he said. "There are not any training camps in the country, especially Mansehra."
This picturesque area of rolling Himalayan foothills, thick forests and isolated farms is the focus of bitter charges that Pakistan continues to allow terrorist training camps to operate on its soil.
During the past year, Taliban prisoners captured in Afghanistan, opposition politicians in Pakistan and Afghan and Indian government officials have said repeatedly that training camps are active in the Mansehra district and other parts of Pakistan, while Pakistani officials vehemently deny they exist.
Last summer, a young Pakistani captured with Taliban forces in Afghanistan said in an interview with The New York Times that he was trained in the Mansehra district by the group Mr. Mohiyuddin said had been disbanded. An armed Pakistani captured in Afghanistan told a private Afghan television channel in June that he had been trained there.
In July, two militants told a Pakistani journalist working on contract for The New York Times that they met one of the July 7 London bombing suspects, Shehzad Tanweer, on a trip to a militant training camp in the Mansehra district last winter. Three Pakistanis recently sentenced to prison terms in Afghanistan for trying to assassinate the American ambassador said they had been trained in the district, an Afghan intelligence official said.
Another Pakistani captured in Afghanistan this month said he had been trained in the Mansehra district.
Sher Ali, a 28-year-old night watchman from Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province who was caught in July on his way to join the mujahedeen, described his training in an interview in a Kabul jail.
The interview took place in an office at the prison on Aug. 14, with no guards present. Mr. Ali described a seemingly underground system in Pakistan that trains fighters and sends them into Afghanistan. He said he met an Afghan at a friend's house in Miranshah, in Pakistan's tribal areas of North Waziristan, a lawless mountain region in which Pakistan says it has deployed 70,000 troops to hunt for militants.
After receiving directions from the Afghan, he journeyed alone to a camp hidden in the mountains above the Mansehra district. "Nowadays they don't have legal camps," he said. "I got the feeling it was a very secret place."
He was given directions and walked for three hours until he came to a small white tent pitched in a clearing. From there, two men took him on foot for another hour or two and he joined a group of 20 Pakistanis. Some, he said, were being trained to fight Indian forces in the disputed region of Kashmir and some were to go to Afghanistan.
There were no buildings, he said, and the men slept on the ground. Their trainer, whom they knew as Maksud, spoke Urdu, he said. "He taught us to use a Kalashnikov and a rocket-propelled grenade," he said. After just three weeks there, he set off for Afghanistan, he said.
But the Afghan police identified him as a Pakistani and detained him.
In southern Afghanistan, a Taliban commander who recently defected to the Afghan government, Mullah Sayed Mir, said a training program for new recruits was also being conducted in and around the southwestern Pakistani town of Quetta.
"The Taliban have rented houses in Pakistan, they live there and also get training there," he said in a recent interview in Zabul Province. "Then, they are sent to Afghanistan."
He said Pakistanis, including local policemen, aided the Taliban. "The Pakistanis would give us some equipment and money if we needed it," he said. "Also they were helping with renting houses in Pakistan for the Taliban." Once, he said, he and a group of 20 fighters had a Pakistani police escort to the border.
Pakistani officials deny aiding the Taliban and say they are aggressively cracking down on all militants. In an interview on July 29, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, said there were no training camps operating in Pakistan with government support.
This spring, some militant groups began using abandoned camps in the Pakistan-controlled portion of the disputed Kashmir region, he said, but government forces intervened.
"There were some vacant camps, and we got information they were being used," said General Musharraf. "We are now going to occupy them."
American officials have credited Pakistan with aggressively cracking down on foreign militants, particularly Al Qaeda.
At the same time, some Afghan and American officials say Pakistan is making little effort to fight the Taliban. Those officials say Pakistan is effectively holding that group in reserve, intending to use it to dominate Afghanistan once the United States withdraws its troops.
Independent and reliable confirmation of any claims about the camps is difficult, if not impossible, to verify.
Foreign journalists are not allowed access to the lawless tribal regions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the Pakistani controlled portion of Kashmir, two areas where many of the camps are reported to be operating.
Pakistani officials also have begun issuing restricted visas that bar foreign journalists from traveling to Quetta and Peshawar, another place where there are said to be training camps. Pakistani officials say the restrictions are for their safety.
But foreign journalists are allowed to travel to the Mansehra district, an area only 60 miles north of Islamabad.
A one-day visit in early August produced ample evidence that militant training camps had operated in the area for years, but no proof that they are still active today.
Local politicians proudly declared that the area supported several training camps in the past 15 years, but those trained only young men fighting Indian forces in the disputed territory of Kashmir.
The government closed the camps, they said, when the India-Pakistan peace talks resumed in early 2004.
"There were camps," said Mohammed Yunus Khattack, the deputy chief of the hard-line Jamaat Islami religious party in the Mansehra district. "But now this is finished."
During the past two months, other reports of training camps in Pakistan have emerged.
In July, a reporter for one of Pakistan's leading news magazines wrote that he had recently visited a reopened training camp in the Mansehra district. The article in the magazine, The Herald, said 13 camps reopened in the Mansehra area in May, including one near the home village of Mr. Mohiyuddin, the cleric who said the camps had closed.
A Pakistani opposition leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, then accused the Pakistani Army of helping and training militants to fight in Afghanistan and of deceiving the West about its commitment to the campaign against terrorism, comments he retracted the next day. Mr. Rehman is the head of a coalition of six Islamist parties in Pakistan and the leader of an opposition bloc in the Pakistani Parliament.
On the road to Mr. Mohiyuddin's village, the seal of Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen was visible on several buildings, but district residents insisted the signs were old.
During a lengthy interview in his madrassa, Mr. Mohiyuddin again denied that training is occurring in the area and repeated the canard that American and Israeli intelligence operatives had staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to create a pretense to invade Muslim countries.
Mr. Mohiyuddin, a small, charismatic man with a boyish face who said he was "about 30," also appeared to be very popular. Residents said that crime, which had flourished under corrupt local police and government officials, virtually disappeared after Mr. Mohiyuddin returned from Afghanistan.
Relaxed and confident, Mr. Mohiyuddin described himself as a pious schoolteacher and courageous local crime fighter. He said local politicians jealous of his popularity had unfairly placed him on a list of wanted criminals.
Asked about repeated reports that Harkat is still training militants here, he insisted that the group was no longer active.
"The government disbanded that organization," he said. "We people are now struggling for our living."