ISLAMABAD: A senior Taliban official has denied he is in Pakistan after a tweet he posted on Friday tagged his location as ‘Sindh, Pakistan’.
Zabihullah Mujahid, whose location is meant to be top secret, later posted on Twitter that the tagging of Pakistan as his location was an ‘enemy plot’. Mujahid instead insisted that he was in Afghanistan.
“My Twitter account has been manipulated – as part of weak efforts of enemy plot, it showed that I am based in Sindh of Pakistan,” Mujahid tweeted after his followers pointed out the location. “I call this attempt as fake and shame [sic].”
Mujahid added that the enemy’s plot has now been pointed out and that he can proudly claim his official location as Afghanistan.
The tweet is especially significant since Pakistan has often been accused of having secret links with the Taliban, though the government has often denied those claims.
Twitter noted that its geolocation data is based on latitude and longitude data, as well as other information provided by users at the time of their tweet.
The social media platform also includes a warning to its users that once something is posted, anyone can see it.
Mujahid, the official spokesperson for the Taliban in Afghanistan, has almost 6,000 followers on his Twitter account.
The Americans say that there are a number of different men all pretending to be Zabiullah Mujahid. An intelligence analyst said that “there’s no way Zabiullah Mujahid could be one person... No one person could take that many calls from the media.”
An American official stated that “There’s no question these guys are not in Afghanistan...Most of them never have been. The last time they were in Afghanistan was probably six years ago.”
He was interviewed with his back towards the TV camera in early 2009 by CNN reporter Nic Robertson inside a room.
To a question relating to ending the war in Afghanistan and bringing peace, Mujahid indicated it was possible but with conditions:
“Our conditions are clear, we want to negotiate and they [the US] will not interfere in our affairs, secondly they [the US] will leave the country, third let the Afghan people to do what they want to do, like form the Islamic government they want to establish,” Zabihullah said.
Shortly after the CNN interview was broadcast, some jihadi websites carried denials, some attributed to Mujahid himself, saying the person Robertson interviewed was not Mujahid.
AGENCY
