Guantanamo 'branded Pakistan's intelligence agency as terrorists'

Guantanamo Bay authorities declared Pakistan's main intelligence agency a terrorist organisation along with Hamas and other international militant networks, according to leaked documents likely to damage already rocky relations between Pakistan and the CIA.

The 2007 documents from the Guantanamo Bay prison are part of a batch of classified material released by the Wikileaks website and included interrogation summaries from more than 700 detainees.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which falls under the control of the country's military, declined to comment, but it has consistently denied any ongoing links with Islamist militants.

The ISI is included in a list of more than 60 international militant networks, as well as Iran's intelligence services, that appear in guidelines for interrogators at Guantanamo. It says the groups are "terrorist" entities or associations, and that detainees linked to them "may have provided support to al-Qaeda and the Taleban, or engaged in hostilities against US and coalition forces".

The CIA and the ISI have worked closely together since the 9/11 attacks to hunt down al-Qaeda terrorists sheltering in Pakistan. But American officials have often voiced suspicions that elements of the ISI were either linked to or supporting militants even as the two countries publicly talked of their alliance in the campaign against extremism.

Those suspicions appear to be bolstered in part by documents about some individual Guantanamo detainees.

The profile of one, Harun Shirzad al-Afghani, says the US believes he attended an August 2006 meeting that included a variety of militants as well as representatives of Pakistan's military and intelligence service, and that they decided to increase attacks in certain provinces of Afghanistan.

The profile also states that al-Afghani claimed that an unnamed ISI officer paid $12,000 (7,300) to a militant involved in transporting ammunition to a weapons depot in eastern Afghanistan.

Relations between the US and Pakistan hit a new low this year after a CIA contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis he claimed were robbing him. Since then, the ISI has complained about American drones strikes along the Afghan border and the alleged existence of scores of CIA agents in the country without its knowledge.

In a rare public accusation last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said the ISI had continued links with the powerful network of an Afghan warlord that has bases in a north-western tribal region of Pakistan.Hours later, Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, rejected what he called "negative propaganda" by the US.

Allegations of links between the ISI and Islamist militants date back to the 1980s, when Pakistan - along with the United States - was supporting the "Afghan Jihad" against the Soviet occupation in neighbouring Afghanistan.