Washington: According to US intelligence documents, Pakistan helped al-Qaida members launch their operations in Afghanistan in the 1990s and even secretly ran a major training camp used by Osama bin Laden's terror network.

The documents, produced by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and declassified in a censored version recently, also indicate that Afghan guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Masood may have been killed two days before the September 11 attacks because he had learned something about Laden's plan and "began to warn the West".

In its secret dispatches, obtained by the National Security Archive, a non-profit research organisation in Washington, the DIA warns that the documents represent only raw intelligence.

However, they paint a complex picture of factional rivalry, in which Pakistan had tried to use the Taleban and al-Qaida to promote its influence in war-torn Afghanistan --only to eventually lose control over both of them.

"Taleban acceptance and approval of fundamentalist non-Afghans as part of their fighting force were merely an extension of Pakistani policy during the Soviet-Afghan war," said one of the DIA dispatches among US government agencies after the September 11 attacks but before US troops began their operation to root out the Taleban in Afghanistan.

Agencies