After India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, during a presser on Saturday, dismissed the “ludicrous claim” by Pakistani Army spokesperson about Indian missiles hitting Afghanistan, social media users began digging into the background of Pakistan’s DG ISPR, Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry. What they found sparked a fresh row. His father, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, has had close ties with Osama bin Laden and his terrorist outfit al-Qaeda.
Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry is the son of Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. He is a three-star General commissioned into the EME Corps, has been serving as the Pakistani Army’s spokesperson since December 2022, succeeding Babar Iftikhar.
Who is Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood?
Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, 85, was designated a terrorist by the United Nations in 2001. He was also blacklisted by the US as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, with his known address lisited as the Al-Qaeda Wazir Akbar Khan safe house in Kabul.
UN blacklisted him for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf, or in support of”, “supplying, selling or transferring arms and related materiel to” or “otherwise supporting acts or activities of” Usama bin Laden, Al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The sanctions followed reports that Mahmood had provided Osama bin Laden with sensitive information about chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. He is believed to have had close ties to bin Laden, and remains largely reclusive, reportedly living in anonymity in Islamabad.
Mahmood, who is a nuclear engineer, spent years working with the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) before taking early retirement. In 1999, he founded the now-banned right-wing organisation Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN). The US sanctioned the organisation in 2001.
A year after founding UTN, he began attending religious lectures by Dr Israr Ahmed, which heavily influenced his ideological stance. That same year, he began travelling to Afghanistan on the pretext of doing relief work and in 2001, he reportedly met Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri with one of the members of the UTN.
“There is little doubt that Mahmood talked to the two al-Qaeda leaders about nuclear weapons, or that Al Qaeda desperately wanted the bomb,” read a line from the NYT editorial titled Obama’s Worst Pakistan Nightmare.
Awarded with Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 1998, the third-highest civilian award in Pakistan, Mahmood holds two master’s degrees from the University of Manchester – one in control systems and another in nuclear engineering.
He had once claimed that Pakistan’s energy-related problems could be solved by taming “djinns” as they were made of fire, per the Islamic belief. He has also written several books on doomsday, where he warned that the “last hour” is imminent.