Pakistan says wounded Uzbek militant on the run

12.00pm

ISLAMABAD - A senior Uzbek al Qaeda member was wounded in recent fighting with Pakistani forces on the border with Afghanistan and is on the run, the Pakistani military said on Saturday.

Pakistani forces have fought against several hundred al Qaeda militants and their Pakistani tribal allies since March 16 in the lawless South Waziristan tribal region as part of the government's push to clear the area of foreign militants.

"Sources have confirmed that Tahir Yuldashev, one of the top al Qaeda leaders...was also injured in that operation and is now hiding," the military said in a statement.

Yuldashev is the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and was accused of a series of bomb blasts in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, in 1999.

He was known to have taken refuge in the semi-autonomous Pakistani tribal areas.

Experts say it had been an open secret for some time that Yuldashev and some central Asian colleagues were sheltering there after fleeing Afghanistan as their Taleban allies were forced from power by US-led forces in late 2001.

More than 160 suspected militants had been detained and a large quantity of arms and other equipment seized in the operation, the military said.

"Intelligence sources and other information gathered from those apprehended during the operation indicate that over 60 miscreants have been killed, while scores of them have been injured since March 16," the statement said.

"A hardened den of miscreants has been completely dismantled," it added.

Pakistan's lawless tribal belt has been a magnet for foreign militant fighters for 20 years, and it is there that al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden cut his teeth in the U.S.-backed war against Soviet rule in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Yuldashev first emerged in the late 1980s as the founder of the Adolat or Justice movement, a gang of young Muslim vigilantes meting out medieval punishment in Uzbekistan's Ferghana Valley during the Soviet Union's final days.

Yuldashev's denouncements of post-communist President Islam Karimov made him a wanted man, and he left to join like-minded Muslim militants fighting Tajikistan's civil war in the 1990s.

He later helped found the IMU, a motley crew including Kyrgyz, Tajiks and even some Uighurs from China's restive Xinjiang province. Their goal was to set up an Islamic state in Uzbekistan and ultimately throughout Central Asia.

Blamed for a series of bomb attacks in Tashkent in 1999, Yuldashev was sentenced to death in absentia. By this time, he was believed to have fled the region for the safe haven of Taleban-ruled Afghanistan.

- REUTERS