Militants ambushed a military convoy carrying prisoners in Pakistan’s volatile northwest yesterday, killing two detained aides of a senior Islamist cleric from the Swat Valley, the army said.
A roadside bomb and gunfire hit the convoy as it traveled from Sakhakot town near Swat to the main northwestern city of Peshawar early yesterday, an army statement said. One soldier also died in the attack and five were wounded, it said.
The army identified the prisoners as Muhammad Maulana Alam and Ameer Izzat Khan, top aides to hardline cleric Sufi Muhammad who negotiated a peace deal with the government that was widely seen as allowing the Taliban to seize control of the Swat Valley.
The deal collapsed earlier this year when the Taliban advanced into neighboring districts, triggering a military offensive that prompted a spree of retaliatory attacks by militants in the northwest and beyond.
A military official speaking on condition of anonymity said the prisoners’ deaths were apparently an accident because the attackers would not have known they were in the convoy.
But Rasul Bahksh Rais, a political scientist at Lahore University, said the killings may have been deliberate to prevent Alam and Khan from giving the military information that could help find Taliban leaders in the Swat region.
“I think it was a targeted killing by the militants because they could identify the whereabouts of some of the militant” leaders, Rais told the Express 24/7 television network. “They were high-value targets.”
No senior Taliban figures have so far been captured or killed in the month-old army offensive in Swat, which is seen as a test of Pakistan’s resolve to take on militants who have challenged the central government’s rule by strengthening its influence in the border region with Afghanistan.
Security forces detained Alam and Khan during a raid last Thursday at a religious school in a district near Swat. Another aide to Muhammad, Syed Wahab, was also seized. It was not immediately known if Wahab was in the convoy yesterday.
The Taliban have vowed a campaign of retaliatory attacks for the military offensive and a series of bombings and shootings have hit security forces and civilian targets, including a marketplace and a bus stop.
On Friday, an attacker wearing an explosive vest blew himself up inside a packed mosque during prayers, killing at least 30 and wounding 40 more in Haya Gai village in Upper Dir, a rough-and-tumble district next to Swat.
The motive for such attacks on civilians is rarely clear, but it could be partly an attempt to use violence and intimidation to weaken public support for the army’s operation.
No one claimed responsibility for Friday’s mosque attack, but a local government official blamed the Taliban and said it was probably retaliation for the Swat offensive.
It was unclear whether any military figures or prominent anti-Taliban local officials were in attendance at the mosque.
Waliullah Khan, a village resident, said he was on his way to the mosque when he heard an explosion.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing