London, April 27: An Afghan politician identified as a key aide to al-Qaeda terrorists was funded by the British aid budget, according to documents released by WikiLeaks.
The British government paid a tremendous sum of money to an Afghan politician that turned out to be an al-Qaeda supporter, fresh WikiLeaks documents show.
London paid more than £300,000 to Mullan Haji Rohullah who was later detained and transferred to the US Guantanamo facility to eradicate his poppy crops.
The Afghan reportedly used the money to fund extremists while continuing his drug trafficking business.
The WikiLeaks documents show Rohullah held meetings with the British ambassador in Afghanistan and they hammered a deal to pay $250 (£152) an acre to local farmers in Afghanistan’s Kunar province to stop growing poppies.
Rohullah is also linked to British intelligence services in the Guant?namo files.
“It appears detainee [Rohullah] was not only receiving money from selling poppies when he claimed he was prohibiting them from being grown in Kunar province, but he was also receiving financial aid from the British,” the documents said.
London also allocated $6?million (£3.6? million) in international development funds to one of Rohullah’s aides of which only $3.5 million was given to tribal leaders.
This comes as the documents claim the “important politician” was also “linked to plots to kill leaders within the interim Afghanistan government” and “had dealings with the United Kingdom and the Pakistani ISID [Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate].”
According to the disclosures, Rohullah who was detained in 2002 and subsequently released, was “supposedly” a supporter of the Afghan Interim Administration though that was a guise for “conducting operations that undermined the transition process”.
The British government’s £290 million scheme to reportedly help eradicate Afghan poppy farms and drugs trafficking in three years has proved controversial due to serious questions about the real destination of overseas development funding allocated to Afghanistan following the 2001 invasion of the country.
——–Agencies