'UK created Taliban'

Head of the IRIB World Service Mohammad Sarafraz says the United Kingdom was the first state which created the Taliban militant group in Afghanistan.


“The first state which created the Taliban was not Pakistan; the Taliban was created by Britain in the first place,” Sarafraz said at the review session of his book The Taliban Movement: The Mystery of its Rise and Fall, Fars News Agency reported Saturday.

Sarafraz said the notion was confirmed by Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto during an interview with the state-run BBC, but currently all records of it have been removed from archives and this was ultimately the reason behind her assassination in December 2007.

Bhutto was slain in a gun-and-bomb attack as she was leaving an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi in Pakistan.

“Now all the media archives of this interview have been erased,” he further explained.

Sarafraz went on to say that “in the death of Benazir Bhutto, there are suspects such as Pervez Musharraf, who is regarded as one of the prime suspects, but he is now living in Britain.”

Musharraf, who is a retired army general, was the President of Pakistan when Bhutto was assassinated. Many Pakistani officials have pointed the finger of blame at the then government of Musharraf and threatened to take action against the former military ruler.

Sarafraz also raised the issue of September 11, 2001 attacks and questioned the scenarios presented by the US government about the incident.

“Al-Qaeda and the US have devised scenarios in this regard, which have been discussed in the book, but the attacks were not staged by a group called al-Qaeda and there are many contradictions in this matter,” he pointed out.

“The US passenger airliners are completely automatic so that ordinary pilots cannot steer them,” Sarafraz said, adding that a hole was created on the side of the Pentagon building during the attacks, which shows it was not hit by an airplane, but by a missile.

In a recent blog entry, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said that the attacks on the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, New York City, and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, could not have been carried out by Muslims but it was the “American Government” itself which performed the attacks.

Recent video images leaked ahead of the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 incident confirm eye-witness accounts that the attack was made by a cruise missile rather than a passenger plane.

The close photographs of the Pentagon also show no wreckage of the plane, although normally the remains of a plane wreck sometimes cover a square of a mile.

According to the Iranian author, the newly published book also discusses the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and issues related to Pakistan's spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and army.

Additionally, the work makes analytical speculations about the future political prospects of Taliban militants and the US presence in Afghanistan.

The book, The Taliban Movement: The Mystery of its Rise and Fall is the first book on the Taliban published in Persian language.

MAB/HGH/HJL
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/198455.html