Former spy chief: US wants to put me on terror list

Islamabad: A former head of the Pakistani military's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) said on Sunday the United States wants him on a UN list of people and organisations linked to Al Qaida and the Taliban.

Long retired, Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul said the US moves against him began several weeks ago, pre-dating the latest controversy surrounding the ISI.

The agency is currently under scrutiny because of its past links with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmir jihadi organisation that India and US officials suspect supplied the gunmen who killed at least 171 people in a horrifying attack on Mumbai last month.

Gul, a vocal critic of the US military presence in Afghanistan, said Pakistani foreign ministry officials had confirmed to him the United States was trying to put him on the UN list. He said he had asked his government for support.

"I don't know why America is so much after me," said Gul from his home in the military cantonment area of Rawalpindi, south of Islamabad.

Lou Fintor, spokesman for the US embassy in Islamabad said he had no information, and added it was government policy not to comment until action had been taken either by the United Nations or the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Asset freze

Pakistani officials could not be contacted.

The News newspaper reported yesterday that Gul was one of five former ISI officers the US wanted the Security Council to put on the list to freeze their assets.

Gul was director-general of the ISI from 1987 to 1989, at the end of a mujahideen war, covertly funded by the US and Saudi Arabia, to drive the Soviet army out of Afghanistan.

It was at the tail-end of this period that Pakistani support began for a separatist movement in Indian Kashmir. Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group whose leader hails from Sargodha, the same city as Gul, was founded in 1990.

Gul says he supports the Afghan resistance to Western forces at a moral and academic level, but no more than that. Gul maintains 9/11 attacks in the United States were more likely the work of an Israeli conspiracy than Al Qaida.