On Oct, 18, 1988 nine weeks after a C-130 transport plane crashed in Pakistan killing the country’s leader Gen Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq an American from Illinois Mark Alphonzo Artis was arrested by local police while boarding a domestic flight in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Police said they initially found about 10 grams of hashish on Artis. But in his belongings police said they discovered paraphernalia that startled them: an aviation book maps electronic equipment pro-Iranian radical literature and validated visas to Iran in Artis’s U.S. passport. The items led the police and senior Pakistani government officials to believe that the American might be a prime suspect in a plot to sabotage Zia’s plane.

The arrest marked the beginning of a bizarre and still unresolved episode in the enduring mystery of Zia’s death on Aug.171988. His demise stunned world leaders and transformed the politics of Pakistan for decades the most important ally of the United States in the region and the staging ground for the U.S.-sponsored covert war against the Soviet backed government in Afghanistan. Also on his plane were the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan 10 top Pakistani generals and a senior U.S. Air Force general.

The Artis case leaves many questions unanswered including whether the free-wheeling American businessman-who has told some associates that he was a Shiite Muslim involved in a jihad or holy war-had anything at all to do with the Zia crash.

Artis who is in his twenties denied being involved in the Zia crash according to a senior Pakistani intelligence official. But the official declined to provide details of what else Artis may have said under questioning.

After several months in detention Artis was released in the spring of 1989. It was only then U.S. officials say that they were notified by Pakistan that he had been held on a drug charge.

Some U.S. officials later learned that he had been secretly interrogated for months by Pakistani intelligence officials on suspicion of terrorism and espionage but no U.S. agency has sought to locate or interview Artis who returned to the United States but whose where about are unknown. Relatives of artis said he was in rough mental and physical shape at the time of his release and was hospitalized briefly in Georgia for mental illness. Washington Post April 15)

Article extracted from this publication >> April 26, 1991