KABUL (PAN): Afghan security forces have detained two individuals in Kabul on charges of spying for Iran and remote-controlled bomb devices were recovered from them.

Syed Kamal and Syed Hussain confessed in a video tape, available to Pajhwok Afghan News, to having links with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Kamal said he migrated to Iran in 1996 and joined a military base of the Sipah-i-Pasdaran for training.

The same year when the mujahideen government was toppled by the Taliban, the Iranian government tasked him creating a party of Afghan refugees in Iran under the name of “Sipah-i-Mohammad.”

He said they went to Mashhad to register Afghan refugees for training by the Iranian military. On completion of training, the Afghans were sent to their home country for disruptive activities, he added.

“As a member of Sipah-i-Mohmmad, I was sent to northern Takhar province for military activities in 2000. I came to Kabul after the collapse of the Taliban regime,” the detainee said.

About two months ago, Kamal said, a member of the group, Haji Mohsin, handed him a bag including four remote-controlled devices. The devices had multiple functions, including the one that could detonate 10 bombs at a time from a distance of five kilometres.

“One of the tools with an electronic eye disables devices in the military vehicles used to defuse remote-controlled bombs,” he revealed, adding the tools were made exclusively by a weapons factory of the Sipah-i-Pasdaran.

“When the Iranian military took us to the factory, they asked us to wear sunglasses so we could not properly recognise where the training centre was located,” he went on.

“Currently, the Revolutionary Guards recruit young people for terrorist activities in Afghanistan and try to revive the Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan led by Gulbadin Hekmatyar and Taliban groups,” he alleged.

Kamal claimed militants, including Afghans, Palestinians, Iraqis and Lebanese, were being trained at military training centres on the outskirts of Mashhad, Khash area of Zahidan, Tarbat Jam and some areas in Tehran.

He was encouraged by being told the US had brought misfortune to Iraqis and Palestinians and wanted to bring the same to Afghanistan, another detainee, Syed Hussain, confessed in the video tape.

He would transfer secret documents from Kabul to Mashhad, with Iran paying the delivery cost, he said.

He recalled two persons --- Herati and Hussaini, gave him a tin of ghee and a television set in the Company area of Kabul. Later, the pair came to his house in Khushal Khan Mina and starting making a bomb from the explosives placed the tin and wires and a remote-controlled device in the TV set.

Later, the two planted the remote-controlled bomb on a road in the area, but the device was defused by security personnel, he added. Both the detainees regretted their past activities.

On Sunday, Afghan journalist Abdul Wahid Hakimi, working with the state-run Iranian news agency, was detained by intelligence operatives on charges of spying. The detainee was transferring secret documents to the Iranian embassy in Kabul.

myn/ma/mud