to the evil murderous Taliban.
Posted on 11/26/2002 2:15:25 PM PST by knighthawk
KABUL: Afghanistan Tuesday freed 87 Pakistani prisoners accused of fighting alongside the former Taliban regime in a gesture aimed at building bridges between the two countries.
A statement by the Afghan foreign ministry said the release, the largest yet, was part of a continuing programme which has seen the repatriation of several dozen Pakistanis over the past few months.
"As part of the ongoing process of releasing foreign prisoners held in Afghanistan accused of illegal and subversive actions, a new group who ... were armed and fighting against the Afghan people at different periods of time in the past seven years will be released," the statement said.
The men, many of them elderly, were handed over to the Pakistani embassy in Kabul under a deal negotiated by the United Arab Emirates and supervised by the International Committee of the Red Cross, it added.
Pakistan estimates that some 2,000 of its citizens were arrested for allegedly fighting alongside the Taliban regime and that around 1,000 are still languishing in Afghan jails.
Thousands of Pakistanis, many of them young religious students from remote rural areas, flooded into Afghanistan to support the Taliban, once backed by Pakistan, against a US-backed military coalition which routed the extremists and their al-Qaeda associates late last year.
But many of those freed Tuesday protested their innocence, insisting they had merely been working in Afghanistan when they were arrested.
Azim Khan, from the Swat area of Pakistan close to the border with Afghanistan, said he was employed as a woodcutter in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar when soldiers arrested him and 46 others.
"We were here to work, we were not fighting with the Taliban," he said.
Mohammad Kabir Farahi, consulate director of the Afghan foreign ministry, said the men had all committed crimes.
"The release of these men is another step towards making friendly and good relations with Pakistan," he said.
"Among them there are people that were arrested in fighting against the government, they were Taliban, and also there are others that committed other crimes.
"A big number of them were arrested in the front and we released them as a gesture to Pakistan and we hope they will not commit these things again."
Afghan authorities earlier this month released 17 Pakistani men accused of fighting alongside the Taliban, saying their sentences had been completed.
Yeah, but wait until dark and they're handed AK's. They all can LOOK innocent - sometimes.
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