Most Wanted Kashmiri Militant Leader Released in Pakistan

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, April 02, 2002

Most Wanted Kashmiri Militant Leader Released in Pakistan

Pakistani authorities have released a Kashmiri militant who features on a list of India's most wanted people, party officials said on Monday.

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Pakistani authorities have released a Kashmiri militant who features on a list of India's most wanted people, party officials said on Monday.

The release of Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, founder of now outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba group, followed a decision by a court in Lahore to refuse a government bid to extend his detention.

"He was released after midnight," Saeed's spokesman Yahya Mujahid told Reuters by telephone from Lahore.

Saeed quit the leadership of Lashkar-e-Taiba shortly after India blamed it and another militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammad, for a December 13 attack on the Indian parliament.

Pakistani authorities detained Saeed and Jaish-e-Mohammad's fiery leader Maulana Azhar Masood in December amid mounting international calls for President Pervez Musharraf, a key ally in US-led war on terror after the September 11 attacks, to rein in Islamic militancy.

Masood is still in detention and Musharraf has banned both groups.

Masood and British-born militant Ahmed Saeed Omar Sheikh, one of four people charged with the kidnap and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, were freed from an Indian jail in 1999 in exchange for 155 hostages held on an Indian airliner hijacked to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

About a dozen militant groups are fighting India's rule in Muslim-majority Kashmir, where authorities say about 33,000 people have died in 12 years of rebellion.

Separatists put the toll closer to 80,000.

India, which controls 45 percent of Kashmir, accuses Pakistan of arming and training militants. Pakistan, which holds a third of the region, denies the charge and says it only offers moral, political and diplomatic support to Kashmiri separatists.

The mountainous region remains the bone of contention between India and Pakistan, who have fought two of their three wars over it since 1947, and has been at the centre of military standoff between the nuclear-armed rivals since attack on the Indian parliament.

Up to one million troops have been mobilised on both sides of the border since then.

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