Eight dead in Pakistan blast as Taliban targeted

Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 9:56 PM Posted by Beijing News


The latest in a string of bombs in northwest Pakistan killed eight people Sunday as a US missile strike hit a tribal belt where troops are expected to launch a fresh anti-Taliban onslaught.

Militants remotely-detonated explosives hidden in a rickshaw, causing chaos at a busy Sunday market in northwest Dera Ismail Khan town, with at least eight people killed and dozens injured, police and hospital officials said.

Dera Ismail Khan is about 300 kilometres 186 miles south of the provincial capital Peshawar, where a commando-style suicide gun and bomb attack killed nine people at the luxury Pearl Continental hotel on Tuesday.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for that attack and twin bombings at mosques on Friday, exacting revenge for a seven-week military offensive against them across swathes of the northwest.

"Eight people have been killed and 20 injured in the blast," said Syed Mohsin Shah, the top administrator of Dera Ismail Khan town.

"The bomb was planted in a cycle-rickshaw and it was rush hour in the bazaar at the time of blast," he told AFP.

Dera Ismail Khan district borders the lawless tribal agency of South Waziristan, where a suspected missile strike by a US drone aircraft targeting Islamist extremists killed at least three people Sunday, officials said.

"A drone attack targeting a militant vehicle killed three people in Mardar Algad area," said Amir Mohammad Khan, a local administration official. "There is a training camp close to this area."

A security official based in Peshawar told AFP: "Uzbek and Arab militants were killed in the strike."

Washington alleges that Al-Qaeda and Taliban senior leaders and fighters who fled Afghanistan after the 2001 US-led invasion are holed up in South Waziristan, plotting attacks on Western targets.

The US military does not, as a rule, confirm drone attacks, but its armed forces and the CIA operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy drones in the region.

Pakistan publicly opposes drone attacks, saying they violate its territorial sovereignty and deepen resentment among the populace. Since August 2008, more than 40 such strikes have killed about 420 people.

Pakistan's military has also recently bombed militant hideouts in South Waziristan -- a rugged, semi-autonomous region on the Afghan border -- as they escalate a seven-week campaign to crush Taliban militants.

"In my opinion the blast in Dera Ismail Khan is a follow-up to the Swat and Waziristan operations," said Mohammad Iqbal Khan, district police chief.

Security forces launched an offensive against Taliban fighters across three northwestern districts near Swat valley on April 26, after the insurgents advanced to within 100 kilometres 60 miles of Islamabad.

The offensive recently expanded into Bannu district, which borders South Waziristan and Dera Ismail Khan, and a US defence official said Friday the tribal zone on the Afghan border would be targeted by Pakistani forces next.

The region is a stronghold of Baitullah Mehsud, the head of Pakistan's umbrella Taliban organisation, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan TTP.

More than 1,980 people have been killed in Taliban-linked attacks in Pakistan since July 2007, with nearly 170 killed since the military launched the anti-Taliban offensive in late April.



Schalit

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