Afghanistan's government on Monday angrily dismissed as baseless a media report that President Hamid Karzai had met face-to-face with an al Qaeda-linked Taliban leader in Kabul. "No, no! Certainly not!"
Karzai's spokesman said the report on Al-Jazeera TV on Sunday was part of a conspiracy to undermine a government-initiated peace plan aimed at ending almost nine years of war. Al-Jazeera said Karzai had met with Sirajuddin Haqqani, who heads the notorious al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, at his palace in the Afghan capital as a prelude to peace talks. "The report is totally baseless, it is a lie and there is no truth in it," Karzai's spokesman Waheed Omar told reporters. He said the report "was a source of some concern for us because we believe there is a connected chain of irresponsible rumours about the government of Afghanistan".