Captures Point to Pakistan As Taliban Hiding Place

Most of the Taliban's senior leadership has spent the past three months hiding in neighbouring Pakistan, it now appears following the dramatic surrender over the weekend of Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban's former foreign minister.

Officials in Kandahar yesterday said that Mullah Muttawakil had "driven" from Pakistan back into Afghanistan after apparently striking a deal with the US military authorities. Last night he was being held in a "VIP cell" at the American purpose-built detention camp at Kandahar airport.

Mullah Muttawakil - the most senior member of the Taliban in American custody - had been secretly living in the tribal regions of Pakistan near Quetta, the Guardian has learned. Pakistani police arrested the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, Abdul Rahim Zahir, in the same area last week.

Another prominent Taliban commander, Mullah Siddiqullah, was detained on Friday by Pakistani officials at a refugee camp near Peshawar. Mullah Siddiqullah, a senior official in the Taliban's irrigation ministry, fled to Pakistan with his family before US air strikes on Afghanistan began last October.

"Muttawakil came by road from Pakistan. We believe he was in Quetta all this time. He drove back to Afghanistan on Friday," said Mohammad Ashraf, a spokesman for Kandahar's governor, Gul Agha. Mr Ashraf said he did not know whether the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had also taken refuge in Pakistan.

US intelligence officials will be hoping that Mullah Muttawakil can lead them to Mullah Omar and provide vital new information in their flagging efforts to track down Osama bin Laden. Mullah Muttawakil was once Mullah Omar's personal secretary and spokesman.

There have been no sightings of Mullah Omar since he was allegedly spotted a month ago fleeing on a motorbike in Baghran, a remote northern part of Helmand province. One source in Kandahar last night said he was still in the region - or in the equally inaccessible neighbouring province of Oruzgan. Other sources hint that he has fled to Iran.

The Taliban leader's former compound in the north of Kandahar has offered US investigators few clues. The extensive home - repeatedly bombed during the early days of America's air campaign - is now a tourist attraction, visited by Afghans wanting to catch a glimpse of Mullah Omar's double bed.

US special forces teams have already searched the room and the rubble-strewn annexe used by Mullah Omar's four wives, whom he would summon individually using internal telephones. The compound's walls, decorated with landscape scenes of Afghanistan, reveal Mullah Omar's fondness for the pastoral - but not his current location.

US officials are likely to spend several days interrogating Mullah Muttawakil, whose decision to surrender was, according to some sources, secretly brokered by the Pakistani military. The likely presence of so many senior Taliban figures in Pakistan is an embarrassment for the country's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, who is to visit Washington this week and will meet George Bush .

It is unlikely that Mullah Muttawakil will lead the Americans directly to Mullah Omar's door. The two men appear to have fallen out late last year following Mullah Muttawakil's clandestine mission to Islamabad, where he floated the possibility of defecting. Officials in Kandahar said he arrived at the American desert air base declaring: "I have done nothing wrong in law."

But Afghanistan's new government yesterday signalled it had no intention of treating Mullah Muttawakil leniently. "This is the moment we have been waiting for - to make sure that these individuals face trial, either in Afghanistan or outside Afghanistan, for their actions and deeds in the past," said Omar Samad, a spokesman for the Afghan foreign ministry, in Washington yesterday.

The former foreign minister should now be questioned about "human rights violations" and "terrorism activities" during the Taliban years, he said.

Iran has closed offices belonging to a leading Afghan dissident in what is seen as a goodwill gesture towards the US and the interim government in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The move came after Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister of Afghanistan who is exiled in Iran, denounced the new Afghan government of Hamid Karzai as a puppet of America.