Threat to aid agencies not "specific"

Some foreign aid organisations have suspended operations over the weekend in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta after being informed by a government security agency of the threat of suicide attacks by suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives. But a senior police official said on Monday that the threats were no "cause for imminent concern". "I don't think the threats are specific threats. They have been just general threats from extremist elements. But there's no specific threat that we can highlight or say that it is cause for imminent concern," Asif Paracha, an Assistant Inspector-General (AIG) of police, told IRIN from Quetta, the Baluchistan capital. A press statement issued on Monday by the United Nations in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, said that the federal government and Baluchistan's provincial government had informed "the United Nations in Pakistan that the recent allegations of a security threat against the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and international NGOs in Baluchistan were for the purpose of information sharing only". "In this case, the United Nations was advised that investigations have revealed that the threat, if any, was not of the imminent kind," the press release added. The aid organisation Medecines Sans Frontieres (MSF) and NGOs such as Mercy Corps International, Association of Medical Doctors of Asia (AMDA), Concern and the Tear Fund, have suspended activities until the situation was deemed to have improved. Meanwhile, Paracha said, the authorities had taken strict security precautions to ensure the safety of foreigners living and working in Quetta. "We have taken a number of steps, which include taking all these people to one location and so on. But I'm not sure if it can be sustained over a long period of time," he said. "We have taken all the precautions we can," he repeated. Since Baluchistan lies alongside Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants are thought to have sought refuge in the rugged, mountainous countryside and also in Quetta after the US-led war on terror started in late 2001.