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.
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