202 Blackwater Personnel Arrive In Islamabad?
PakistanPal
seeking US support against a possible Pakistani military action
against the unpopular pro-US government in Pakistan?
By NISAR MEHDI
Wednesday, 4 November 2009.
The Nation
WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM
KARACHI, Pakistan-Foreigners affiliated with the notorious private
military contractor Blackwater, later renamed as Xe Services LLC,
arrived in Islamabad on Tuesday through a PIA flight, sources told
TheNation.
"Of the 274 passengers, who boarded Pakistan's national flag carrier-
PIA, flight PK-786 from Heathrow Airport UK, 202 were foreigners but
they were fluently speaking Urdu language," disclosed the sources.
The officials on duty at Shaheed Benazir International Airport
Islamabad said, "We had instructions to allow the foreigners entry
without custom procedure."
The sources said that the plane reached Islamabad airport at 4:08am
PST, and they had received official instructions from the authorities
not to inspect any of them and clear them immediately from the
airport.
An official of PIA confirmed that the PIA flight PK-786 from Heathrow
reached Islamabad at its destination at 04:08 am and said that the
plane had the capacity of 358 passengers but total 274 passengers
travelled on the flight.
He declined to comment the presence of large number of foreigners in
the flight saying that they had no information in this regard.
Former Chief of Army Staff Mirza Aslam Baig has accused former
President Pervez Musharraf of giving Blackwater a green signal to
carry out its terrorist operations in the cities of Islamabad,
Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Quetta.
According to a August 20, 2009 report in the New York Times by Mark
Mazzetti, the Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired contractors
from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a
secret programme to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al-Qaeda.
"Blackwater employees hired to guard American diplomats in Iraq were
accused of using excessive force on several occasions, including
shootings in Baghdad in 2007 in which 17 civilians were killed. Iraqi
officials have since refused to give the company an operating
licence," wrote Mazzetti.
"Several current and former government officials interviewed for this
article spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they were
discussing details of a still classified programme," the NYT reported.
The newspaper report said that despite publicly breaking with it, the
State Department continued to award the company, formerly known as
Blackwater, more than $400 million in contracts to fly its diplomats
around Iraq, guard them in Afghanistan, and train security forces in
anti-terrorism tactics at its remote camp in North Carolina.
Every indication suggests that the US Embassy in Islamabad, which is
being expanded into the world's largest US embassy, has brought in
Blackwater without clearance from Pakistani security authorities and
with direct help from the unpopular pro-US government in Islamabad.
This report was originally published by The Nation.
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