TALEBAN'S 'MINISTER FOR HEROIN' ENTERS BRITAIN

A LEADING member of the Taleban has slipped into Britain supposedly as an
asylum-seeker.

Mohammad Ihsan Mutmain, a former junior minister in the ousted
fundamentalist Government in Afghanistan and a former kung fu champion,
left the country shortly before the September 11 attacks and is now thought
to be living somewhere in London.

Mr Mutmain is wanted for questioning in Kabul about his alleged role in a
drug-running operation which helped the Taleban to fund their civil war
against the Northern Alliance.

It is also thought that he could shed light on the relationship between the
Taleban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, and on events in
Afghanistan in the months leading up to the suicide attacks on the United
States.

Mr Mutmain, 36, is said to have been a close acquaintance of Mullah
Muhammad Omar, the Taleban's leader. He held kung fu exhibitions for Mullah
Omar.

"We would very much like to see this man returned so that he can be
questioned and face justice," a senior official at the Interior Ministry of
the Afghan interim administration said yesterday.

The Times has established that Mr Mutmain left Afghanistan late last
summer, travelling to Britain via Peshawar in Pakistan. The reason for his
departure is unknown to his colleagues at the Ministry of Commerce, where
he served as assistant minister.

It is unclear how he succeeded in entering Britain although the smuggling
of people is known to thrive in Peshawar.

The family now renting Mr Mutmain's house in Kabul said that his wife and
three children left for Peshawar three weeks ago, and were intending to
join him in Britain.

"Whatever he is doing in Britain, he will be making money," Hafizullah
Nooristani, a former colleague at the Taleban's Ministry of Commerce, said.
"He is a deeply corrupt man, a person who was always looking after himself."

Mutmain, 36, is one of five brothers from Parvan province north of Kabul.
His file at the Ministry shows that he joined the Harakat-i-Inquilab
Islami, or Movement of the Islamic Revolution, shortly after the Soviet
Army quit Afghanistan in 1989, and that he joined the Taleban shortly after
the movement seized control of Kabul in 1996.

He was, in effect, third in command of the Ministry of Commerce at the time
when the Taleban used it to channel drug profits from the heroin trade to
its Armed Forces.

By July 2000, when international pressure finally led to the Taleban
prohibiting the planting of opium poppies, Western law enforcement agencies
estimated that the country was responsible for between 50 and 70 per cent
of the world's supplies of heroin, and for more than 90 per cent of the
heroin in Britain.

Poppy growers and traffickers who drove to the Iranian or Pakistani borders
with unrefined opium would be expected to ask for permission at the
ministry, usually using a middleman who would fill in a form detailing the
amount of drugs in each consignment.

Ministry officials would impose a tax on the drug. This would be passed off
as zakat, the Islamic levy that all Muslims are expected to give to the
poor, which is usually about 2.5 per cent of disposable income.

Mr Nooristani suspects that Mr Mutmain was deeply involved in the Taleban's
tax on heroin. "It is inconceivable that a man in his position would not at
least have known what was going on," he said.