Pakistan seeks swap deal to extradite Baloch dissidents living in Britain

Secret talks to get airline bomb suspect back to UK

Sandra Laville and Declan Walsh in Islamabad
Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian

Britain is engaged in secret negotiations with Pakistan to swap a terrorist suspect who is wanted for questioning over the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airlines last summer, the Guardian has learned.

In increasingly tense discussions, the British government is demanding the return of Rashid Rauf, a 26-year-old who is held in a high security prison in Pakistan. But ministers in Pakistan have responded by asking for something in return. In a proposed swap, they are calling for the extradition of up to eight people living in the UK who they claim are involved in an uprising in the western oil-rich province of Baluchistan.

Lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service flew to Islamabad last month to try to speed up the process and help the authorities prepare extradition papers for the eight, according to sources in the Pakistani capital. But human rights groups have condemned any attempt to "barter" individuals, and warned both governments that the due process of the law must be followed.

Mr Rauf, originally from Birmingham, was arrested by Pakistani police last August. He has been charged in Pakistan with possession of 29 bottles of hydrogen peroxide - a key ingredient used in the past by al-Qaida in the manufacture of bombs - and the possession of fake South African identity papers.

Anti-terrorist sources in the UK claim Mr Rauf is a "very important" suspect in the network of British-based Islamist terrorists. His arrest by Pakistan's security services, the ISI, last August sparked a series of raids in Britain in connection with what counter-terrorism officials said was an attempt to blow up transatlantic airliners. Fifteen people have been charged with terrorism offences in connection with the alleged plot.

Mr Rauf's family in Pakistan say the charges against him have been "cooked up". One told the Guardian he bought the hydrogen peroxide to bleach his beard.

Pakistan authorities, but released four months later because they were unable to present any evidence. He remains at liberty.

Mr Baluch, 33, who lives in London, is the chairman of the Baluchistan Rights Movement. He has lived in the UK for more than 20 years, has a British passport and speaks regularly at United Nations conferences on the human rights of the Baluchi population in the region where 73 of the 99 abductions registered by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan took place last year.

Speaking to the Guardian, Mr Baluch said: "I knew that they were after me but I never knew they were to that extent. When I speak at the UN in Geneva they try to threaten me through various groups to tell me to take my issues back home, that they are not international issues. I have grown up with this threat, but I didn't think they would go to these lengths.
"What offences have I committed? I am standing up for human rights, I am speaking out against the disappearances going on Baluchistan.

"I would like to tell the British they need to understand the Baluchi perspective and the whole story. They should not just see this from a Pakistani point of view. They are lying. Pakistan is committing human rights abuses in Baluchistan. My job primarily is to speak out against this. I address issues of human rights, especially the disappearances." The CPS refused to discuss whether lawyers had been sent to Pakistan to help with Islamabad's extradition requests for Mr Baluch, Mr Marri and up to six others.

But a British source in Islamabad said officials from the CPS had travelled to Pakistan earlier this month. One British official said the Pakistanis were having difficulty producing evidence which could stand up in a British court.

Ali Hasan, south Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said: "There isn't a problem with the British exploring the legal options. What there is a problem with is the clandestine nature of this. The British want this individual and must follow due process of the law to get that individual across from Pakistan." 28.3.07

Briton drawn into delicate diplomacy of swaps as Pakistan insists on reciprocal deal for terror suspect

Sandra Laville, Declan Walsh in Islamabad and Richard Norton Taylor 
Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian

The man at the centre of intense bartering between Britain and Pakistan has not been seen in public for three months. Rashid Rauf, a terrorist suspect in London and Islamabad, is being held in a high-security jail in Rawalpindi, outside Pakistan's capital, and the authorities are preventing his lawyer and relatives from visiting.

All attempts by British consular staff to see Mr Rauf have been rebuffed because Pakistan does not recognise dual nationality. His case is being heard concurrently at district and high court level as well as in an anti- terrorism court.

According to his charge sheet he is involved in "cases of murder and terrorism" involving the possession of 29 bottles of hydrogen peroxide and fake South African identity papers which were found at a house he used in Rawalpindi.

Thousands of miles away in London, Mehran Baluch, one of the men the Pakistan security services (ISI) wants to swap for Mr Rauf, remains at liberty, oblivious of his key role in the diplomatic wrangling going on behind closed doors until contacted by the Guardian.

Mr Baluch knows nothing of Mr Rauf. His cause is his native Baluchistan, a remote, oil rich, western province straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Amnesty International and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan have recorded disappearances, arbitrary arrests, detention and torture by the Pakistani security forces.

Born in Nimroz, in the Afghan part of Baluchistan, Mr Baluch came to Britain aged 13 for his education. He has lived here more than 20 years and holds a British passport.

Mr Baluch said that he had dedicated his life to highlighting human rights abuses in Baluchistan, where leading political figures had "disappeared" with increasing regularity over the past year.

"President Musharraf claims they have left the country or gone on holiday," said Mr Baluch, speaking of Pakistan's leader. "Gone on holiday? These are people who don't have enough to eat, how can they afford to go on holiday? I am baffled by this. The ISI must be desperate if they want me extradited. The British should see that they have created a Frankenstein in President Musharraf."

The journey that entwined the fate of the two men began in 2002 following the murder in Birmingham of Mr Rauf's uncle, Mohammed Saeed. Following the fatal stabbing, Mr Rauf went to Pakistan, settling in Bahawalpur, southern Punjab, where his relatives had a close friend, Ghulam Mustafa, who owned a madrasa.

With police in Birmingham seeking to speak to him in connection with his uncle's murder, Mr Rauf made a life in Bahawalpur, marrying Mr Mustafa's daughter Saira, 21.

Another of Mr Mustafa's daughters is married to Maulana Masood Azhar, a leading militant who was released by India in 1999 after a hijacked Indian plane was forced to land in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.

Mr Rauf, who arrived in Pakistan in western clothes, soon grew his beard, donned a shalwar kameez and started to pray five times a day. For four years he worked as an honest and pious businessman, according to friends and relatives in Bahawalpur.

Umer Ahmed, 22, his brother-in-law, said he moved about in rickshaws, mixed little with local people and planned to set up a cosmetics business. "He would sell make-up and talcum powder, that sort of thing," he said.

Mr Rauf also travelled the country with the Tablighi, a high-profile Islamic organisation that dispatches preachers across Pakistan and the world.

Then last August Mr Rauf was arrested by the ISI, in a move that sparked arrests and raids in the UK linked to an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners.

According to officials in Pakistan, Mr Rauf was picked up near Islamabad airport on August 10, 2006, when he gave a false name and produced a false ID card. But his lawyer and family claim that he was pulled off a bus travelling from Bahawalpur to Multan several days earlier.

Shortly after the arrest Pakistani police raided Mr Rauf's house in Bahawalpur, seizing his laptop, passport, mobile phone, video camera, and £4,000 in cash.

Mr Rauf's relatives suspect that foreign, possibly British officials, were watching from a distance in a car with blacked out windows which was parked down the street.

Relatives say that the 29 bottles of hydrogen peroxide also found in his possession, according to the charge sheet, were used to bleach his beard.

The British communicated with Pakistan their interest in Mr Rauf. But terrorist charges against him, which accused him of being a key figure behind the alleged suicide plot to blow up airliners, were dropped last December by a court inPakistan in a move that surprised British security and intelligence officials. Since then the Pakistani authorities have charged Mr Rauf with terrorist related offences in Pakistan, making clear their investigations take precedence over that of the British.

When Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, visited Pakistan last month she made clear Britain's interest in the extradition of Mr Rauf. She was told, however, that Pakistan wanted reciprocity.

According to British sources in Islamabad it was at this meeting that the name of Mehran Baluch was first mentioned as an individual that the Pakistanis wanted in return for Mr Rauf.

Since then sources in Islamabad have told the Guardian that the Pakistanis want up to eight individuals, including Mr Baluch and Gazian Marri, though he is thought to be living in Dubai.

The revelation means the Rauf case is now caught up in the increasingly delicate relationship between the British and Pakistani security and intelligence agencies. With as many as 40,000 young British citizens of Pakistani descent going to Pakistan each year, security sources say the frightening evidence of a growing number of Britons with links to Pakistan apparently prepared to commit terrorist acts in the UK, is a top of priority for both MI5 and MI6.

In that climate Britain is struggling to develop closer ties with the ISI, whose help is needed to monitor the activities of suspect Britons of Pakistani descent.

Aware of their power the Pakistani authorities do little nowadays for the west without some kind of reciprocity, according to Whitehall sources. 28.3.07