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NEW YORK : Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai in an interview published Sunday accused Pakistan's intelligence agencies of sheltering fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Karzai said Omar, who has been on the run since being toppled by a US-led coalition some five years ago, is being harbored in the Pakistani city of Quetta.
"We have solid, clear information indicating that," he told the New York Times.
"And I'm sorry I cannot be silent about this, as much as our friends in Pakistan may not like my saying that," he said.
Omar headed the 1996-2001 Taliban regime that sheltered Al-Qaeda. His government was overthrown in a US-led invasion weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks when it failed to hand over Al-Qaeda leaders wanted for the strikes.
Karzai also blamed Islamabad for a resurgence of violence along their common border.
"We have almost daily reports of suicide bombers coming from there," he told the newspaper.
"If we have better cooperation from Pakistan, a great many of these cross-border crossings would stop."
Pakistan and Afghanistan each have accused the other of allowing Taliban remnants to flourish within its borders since the group was overthrown.
The Afghanistan leader also chided the West for having chosen to battle the Taliban in Afghan villages, instead of preventing Pakistan from financing and sheltering the fundamentalist group.
"Rather than concentrating on the sources of terror, on the financiers of terror, on the trainers of terror, (we focused) rather heavily on going about in Afghan villages, where there was no terrorism, where there was the result of terrorism, yes but not the roots of it, not the springboard of it," he said.
- AFP/ir
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