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Pakistan Arrests Taliban Aide

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Los Angeles Times

Published: January 4, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - In an unusual instance of cross-border cooperation, Pakistani authorities arrested a ranking figure in Afghanistan's Taliban movement after receiving a tip he had crossed into Pakistan, officials disclosed Saturday.

Few details were provided about the arrest of Ustad Yasar, a senior aide to Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. He had been freed by Afghan officials in 2007 in a much criticized prisoner exchange to secure the freedom of a kidnapped Italian journalist.
Pakistani officials said Yasar was picked up in the frontier city of Peshawar, the hub of the nation's volatile northwest and a growing center of the Islamist insurgency on the Pakistan side of the border. They did not say when the arrest occurred.

Western military officials say senior Taliban commanders and lower-level fighters move freely back and forth across the rugged, poorly marked Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. Rarely do Pakistani officials move to seize such figures on the Pakistan side of the border.

Yasar's arrest was disclosed one day after a meeting in Kabul, the Afghan capital, at which senior Afghan, Pakistani and Western officials discussed ways to better coordinate efforts to fight Islamic insurgents.

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