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Govt probing Huawei for Taliban link on US tip-off

The government is probing the local operations of Chinese telecommunications gear maker Huawei Technologies after a US tip it may have sold equipment to the ousted Afghan Taliban, a government official said on Tuesday.

Huawei spokesmen in China and India denied the allegations.

"We have never provided the Taliban with any equipment," said a spokesman from the company's headquarters in China's southern boom town of Shenzhen.

A senior Indian government official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters US agencies had tipped off their counterparts in New Delhi after discovering Huawei's equipment in Afghanistan.

"The technology may have originated from any of Huawei's facilities and not necessarily from its Indian unit," said the official. "But the government is concerned and wants to make sure the Indian unit has in no way helped the Taliban," he said.

J Gilbert, a senior public relations officer at Huawei's office in Bangalore, said reports linking the firm to the Taliban regime were baseless.

"First of all we don't have any link with the Taliban. We are a telecoms solutions firm and only telecommunications carriers are our customers," Gilbert said by phone from Bangalore.

Gilbert said Huawei India was a research and development firm which made high-tech software and did not manufacture any equipment in the first place.

"None of the technologies we are working on in India have reached the market. And they are such cutting-edge technologies like 3G, next generation data communications and router technologies that the Taliban would have no use for them."

Huawei, whose technology areas are similar to those of global giants such as Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks, set up its Bangalore unit in 1999 and has invested about $20 million in it.

The unit employs 513 people and is Huawei's biggest centre outside China.

China's Huawei is aggressively expanding into overseas markets with telephone switches, optical transmission and wireless telecommunications gear. It expects revenues of more than $4 billion this year.

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