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AJK Forest Dept teams to locate 6 missing students

MUZAFFARABAD (AJK): Azad Kashmir Forest Department has deputed and sent three teams to locate and search six including two missing girl students of BSc forestry of Peshawar Institute of Forest here on Wednesday.

According to details 31 students of BSc forestry of Peshawar Institute of Forest who were on their trip to the upper areas of mountains in the Kaghan valley had started their journey on July 12 and were to reach Makra mountain in district Muzaffarabad via Paris Shugran in Kaghan valley. They were scheduled to reach the target on the same day but six of them including two girls students were reported missing.

According to AJK Forest department officials ,the officials Peshawar Forest Institute had contacted them and AJK forest department has deputed three teams to search the area to find out the whereabouts of the six missing students.

The missing students are Altaf Ali Shah s/o Zafar Ali Shah resident of Chitral, Temoor Arif s/o Sheikh Arif Riaz of Attock, Syed Ghulam Mujtaba Shah s/o Haji Ali Akbar Shah of Sindh, Abdul Qadeer s/o Muhammad Hayyat of Sindh, Kaneez Fatima d/o Malik Zafar Ali Attock, Umera Begum d/o Faiz Rasool Bannu.

The trainee students of forest Department every year make this trip to the upper areas of the area.

US urges Pakistan to step up crackdown against Taliban

NEW DELHI (India): Pakistan has taken on al-Qaeda but needs to step up a crackdown against Taliban remnants on its territory, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said here on Wednesday, hours before beginning a visit to Islamabad.

Armitage met new Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, using the opportunity to nurture ties and becoming the first senior US official to meet leaders of the Congress-led government that took power after a May election victory.

"We are certainly satisfied that the battle against the al-Qaeda is one in which our Pakistani friends are engaged full force," he said. "You know as well as I do that the activities in the Fata (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), Waziristan have been quite muscular," he said. On the question of the Taliban, Armitage noted that the situation was "a bit more complicated" given the "historical links" between Pakistan and the Taliban.

"I will myself be trying to encourage the Pakistanis to be a little more muscular on that end as well," Armitage told a news conference at the end of the first leg of a four-day visit to South Asia. Armitage said he would also raise the issue of continued violence in disputed Kashmir during talks in Islamabad. "Clearly, people are still dying and this is not an acceptable situation," Armitage said.

Osama aware of plot to disrupt US Polls: CIA

WASHINGTON (US): The acting director of the CIA said that Osama bin Laden must be aware of any planning for a terrorist attack to disrupt the US elections because operatives believed involved in the plot have been closely associated with him.

In an interview, John McLaughlin also said the CIA has enough personnel in Iraq to recruit the necessary intelligence sources there. Although local terrorist cells appear to have more autonomy, McLaughlin said bin Laden is still thought to be knowledgeable of any plotting.

Iraq intelligence ‘Seriously Flawed’

LONDON (UK): Iraq had no stockpiles of useable chemical or biological weapons before the war, and British intelligence to the contrary relied in part on "seriously flawed" or "unreliable" sources, an official inquiry reported on Wednesday.

However, it absolved Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government and the intelligence agencies of "deliberate distortion or culpable negligence." Lord Butler’s report, echoing the damning findings of last week’s US Senate report, said that Iraq "did not have significant, if any, stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment or developed plans for using them."

It said a September 2002 dossier prepared by Blair’s government on the Iraqi threat pushed its case to the limits of available intelligence and left out vital caveats. "Language in the dossier may have left with readers the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgments than was the case," the report said.

Butler, a retired civil service chief, was also highly critical of British intelligence-gathering in Iraq. One source on chemical and biological weapons was "open to doubt," while other reports "on Iraqi production of biological agent were seriously flawed."

Like a previous inquiry, Butler censured the government over a claim that Saddam could launch some chemical and biological weapons at 45 minutes’ notice. He said the detail should not have been in the dossier, without clarification that it referred to battlefield munitions, not missiles.

The report supported Britain’s disputed claim that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger, saying it came from "several different sources" and had not relied on documents exposed as forgeries by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. "No single individual is to blame. This was a collective operation in which there were the failures we have identified but there was no deliberate attempt on the part of the government to mislead," Butler told a news conference.

The report also tacitly criticised Blair’s informal system of government, in which powerful and un-elected special advisers help him formulate policy, often without elected ministers being present or civil service officials taking minutes. "We are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the government’s procedures which we saw in the context of policy making toward Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed political judgment," the report said. Butler’s five-strong committee spent six months, probing the quality of British intelligence, interviewing Blair, cabinet ministers and top ranking spy chiefs. The report said in the future the government should not use the Joint Intelligence Committee, whose assessments of raw intelligence normally remain secret, to give its publications a public stamp of approval.

Butler told the news conference he had "high regard" for Joint Intelligence Committee chairman John Scarlett, who signed off on the September dossier, and said he should be allowed to take up a new post next month as head of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service.

Blair has weathered three previous inquiries, all of which cleared his government of misusing intelligence on Iraq. His popularity and credibility have suffered and Blair said on Wednesday he hoped the issue could now be put to rest.

Blair said he accepted personal responsibility for any errors made. "I have to accept, as the months have passed, it seems increasingly clear that at the time of invasion Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy," Blair told the House of Commons. But, he insisted: "I cannot honestly say I believe getting rid of Saddam was a mistake at all. Iraq, the region, the wider world is a better and safer place without Saddam."

Opposition Conservative Party leader Michael Howard questioned whether the British public would trust Blair’s judgment in the future. "The issue is the prime minister’s credibility. The question he must ask himself is does he have any credibility left?" Howard asked the Commons. But Blair said: "No one lied, no one made up the intelligence, no one inserted things into dossier against the advice of intelligence services."

North Korea Rejects freezing its nuclear Program

SEOUL (South Korea): North Korea refused Wednesday to freeze its nuclear program for peaceful and civilian purposes, saying it was a matter of sovereignty and should not be included in any freezing or dismantling of its weapons programme.

In a statement issued through the official Korean Central News Agency, a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman added that Pyongyang would only return to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) it opted out of "if the Korean peninsula is denuclearized".

He said North Korea's peaceful nuclear program was "pertaining to its sovereignty and this should never be included in the objects to be frozen or dismantled".