Pakistan Arrests Militants Accused of Attacks in Egypt
PAKISTAN, under pressure from the United States, arrested a large number of Egyptian Muslim militants, including the alleged masterminds of attacks on tourists, a lawyer said Sunday.
The lawyer said police were holding 15 Egyptians charged with plotting attacks on tourists in Egypt.
The Cairo lawyer said that Pakistan has refrained from surrendering suspected militants to Egypt, but it had asked them to leave its territory. Pakistani and Egyptian diplomats said the two countries had no effective extradition treaty.
Asharq al-Awsat newspaper quoted unnamed sources in a report from Islamabad Sunday saying Pakistani police had discovered telephone numbers militants were using to send instructions to their cells in Egypt.
Police in Peshawar have arrested more than 200 people from Libya, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and Sudan in the past few days in a drive against what the Pakistani government has described as suspected terrorists. Authorities later released 133 of the people. POW Document Surfaces
A document has been discovered in Communist Party archives that says North Vietnam held 1,205 US prisoners of war in 11 North Vietnamese prisons in 1972 - three times more than Hanoi admitted at the time, a newspaper reported.
The formerly top secret document, which Russian investigators have given to American researchers, shows that the Hanoi government withheld from the US the number of Americans held in North Vietnam in the 1970s.
A Russian spokesman for a joint US-Russian commission searching the archives said yesterday that the document had been declassified and given to the US. He refused further comment.
A US Embassy spokesman referred all calls on the document to the Defense Department in Washington.
The Russian newspaper Izvestia said the document gives the US "new landmarks" in its search for missing Americans.
More than 2,000 Americans are still listed as missing in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Although more than half are known to have died, there have been scattered but unverified reports of Americans sighted in Southeast Asia since the war ended.
Vietnamese officials repeatedly have denied that any Americans were held in their country beyond 1973, when direct US involvement there ended.
