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| India-Pakistan | |
| Scot known as 'Tartan Taliban' held in Peshawar | |
| 2009-04-14 | |
| Pakistani agencies have detained a Scottish charity worker, who converted to Islam more than two decades ago and was once called the "Tartan Taliban". James McLintock, who goes by his Muslim name, Yaqoob, in Pakistan, was picked up from Peshawar at least two weeks ago. News of his detention surfaced amid a public spat between the British and Pakistani governments after arrest of 11 Pakistani students in England. McLintock, the son of a Dundee chemistry lecturer, studied zoology and botany at university before embracing Islam in the 1980s. On Christmas Eve 2001 he was arrested in the tribal belt while crossing from Afghanistan as US forces were hunting Osama Bin Laden. Initial reports suggested he was a radical extremist, but after interrogation by British intelligence it emerged he was working for a charity, and he was freed.
McLintock said he fought alongside the mujahideen battling Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and in Bosnia in 1994. He was detained by British police in Manchester in 2003 but released shortly afterwards. A year later he said he was going to set up a news agency to counter "one-sided" reporting. His Pakistani wife said they had met in England in the 1990s and ran a charity building religious schools in Azad Kashmir. A Pakistani intelligence official told the Guardian newspaper: "The fact that he's managed to stay here illegally since 2004 doesn't speak well for our law enforcement agencies." | |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 The Tartan sellout needs the book thrown at him for turning traitor and should be tried in Scotland. |
| Posted by: Mark Espinola 2009-04-14 06:42 |