Peshawar, May 3 (ANI): The kidnappers of Afghan ambassador-designate to Pakistan Abdul Khaliq Farahi have broken their silence after almost a year-and-a-half to claim that the diplomat is alive and in their custody.
Farahi, who belongs to Farah province in Afghanistan, served as the Afghan consul general in both Quetta and Peshawar. He had been promoted as Afghanistan’s Ambassador in Islamabad but had not yet taken the charge when he was kidnapped from Peshawar’s posh Hayatabad Town on September 22, 2008.
In videotape made available on Sunday, the Afghan envoy is shown wearing trousers and a half-sleeve shirt. Till now, Pakistani intelligence officials had no clue about his whereabouts and the identity of the men holding him hostage.
Unknown militant organisation Kateeba Salahuddin Ayubi released a videotape of the Afghan envoy and claimed responsibility for his kidnapping. It was the first time that a militant group made such a claim, The News reports.
Narrating his ordeal in the videotape, the Afghan diplomat said: “I am Abdul Khaliq Farahi. Dear listeners, as you know a year-and-a-half ago, the Mujahideen arrested me from Peshawar. For the past one year and six months, I have been spending my days and nights in a very critical condition.
“I appeal to my government and the Afghan nation as well as the international community to make their last attempt to save my life. These people (Taliban) have accused me of working with the misled and the US-sponsored government of Afghanistan and the punishment of this crime is death sentence.”
After Farahi, an armed Taliban fighter standing behind him began to deliver his statement in an aggressive tone highlighting so-called successes and achievements of the Mujahideen. (ANI)
Sarkozy, Napoleon had distinct similarities, says French commentator
Paris, Jan.22 (ANI): A French political commentator has claimed that there are distinct similarities between President Nicholas Sarkozy and the country’s former Emperor Napoleon.
In his book, Alain Duhamel points out the startling parallels between Sarkozy and Napoleon – and their marriages to Carla Bruni and Empress Josephine
According to The Independent, which has accessed excerpts from the book, both will be remembered as vertically challenged men in a vertiginous hurry. Beautiful wives, with whom they quarrelled, also helped both into power.
He further goes on to say in his book that both believed that they had a destiny to rebuild France and, above all, to change the way the French think of themselves.
Both are also known for a weakness for kitsch and anything that glitters.
Both came from non-French, minor aristocratic backgrounds and despised the Parisian elite. Both had, from the start of their career, an obsession with image and grasped the importance of controlling the media.
President Sarkozy is also almost exactly the same height as L’Empéreur, about 5ft 6in, which was, in fact, respectably tall in Napoleon’s day.
France remains schizophrenic about Napoleon’s character and legacy. The street-map of Paris is littered with tributes to the emperor’s generals, victories, armies and treaties but it has no grand avenue or boulevard named after Napoleon himself.
Duhamel’s book is, on balance, positive about both men. But, crucially, it limits the period of its comparison to the “Bonaparte” years between 1799 and 1804, when the young Corsican general imposed order on the post-revolutionary muddle. As “First Consul”.
Bonaparte laid down the framework of the modern French state, from the code civile, to the franc, to the Légion d’honneur, to the colleges for training an “elite”.
Duhamel, however, avoids a comparison between the two with the Napoleon years 1804-15, when Bonaparte crowned himself emperor and entered a tyrannical and megalomanic spiral which ended at Waterloo. (ANI)