Spokesman For Pakistani Foreign Ministry Refutes Information About Pakistani Arms Supplies To Taliban

A spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry has refuted the information about Pakistani arms supplies to the Taliban movement. Speaking on Friday evening at a briefing, Riaz Muhammad Khan, a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, stated that Islamabad was carefully fulfilling the UN Security Council's resolution envisaging embargo on all kinds of arms supplies to the Taliban movement. In addition, the diplomat called the article of the Washington Post a fiction. Khan stressed that by now, Pakistan had banned all supplies to Afghanistan, including those of fuel and petrol. Speaking about Pakistani militants' crossing the Afghan border, Riaz Muhammad Khan stated he was not aware of any details of such incidents. At the same time, he said that Islamabad had repeatedly called upon the Taliban to stop allowing Pakistani citizens to participate in military action. "We will not let Pakistanis go to Afghanistan," he added. At the same time, he gave no details of the Pakistani authorities' measures to implement such a promise. Another participant in the press conference was Major-General Rashid Kureshi, the spokesman for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Speaking about the arrest of 10 nuclear scientists suspected of having links to the Taliban movement, Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terrorist organisation, he said that only two retired scientists had been temporarily detained to clear up the details of their humanitarian activities in Afghanistan. According to Rashid Kureshi, both scientists have already been released. As to the Karakorum motorway blocked by activists of religious parties, the General stated that "the biggest part of the mainline was operating on its regular schedule." Meanwhile, as some sources in Kohistan (one of the mountainous regions where the Karakorum motorway runs) reported, the motorway itself has really been cleared out: all fundamentalists-made abatises have been exploded and cleared out, but in some sectors, armed militants have taken eminence positions, which makes it impossible to re-store the traffic. The General also confirmed that there were two registered cases when the post arriving in Pakistan contained anthrax agents, but "no people had been infected yet."