Pakistan said yesterday it had not decided when to reopen a key border crossing NATO uses to ship supplies to Afghanistan despite a US apology for a helicopter attack that killed two Pakistani soldiers.
A suspected US missile strike, meanwhile, killed three people in a northwestern Pakistan tribal region along the border, the latest in a surge of such attacks on militant strongholds, intelligence officials said.
Both the US and NATO expressed their condolences on Wednesday for the Sept. 30 attack and said US helicopters mistook the Pakistani soldiers for insurgents being pursued across the border from Afghanistan.
The apologies raised expectations that the Torkham border crossing along the famed Khyber Pass could reopen very soon. But Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said at a news conference yesterday that authorities were still evaluating the situation and would make a decision “in due course.”
The delay could be short-lived since US and Pakistani officials predicted the border crossing would be reopened in a matter of days even before the apologies were issued.
Pakistan closed Torkham to NATO supply convoys on the same day as the attack, leaving hundreds of trucks stranded alongside the country’s highways or stuck in traffic on the way to the one route into Afghanistan from the south that has remained open.
Suspected militants have taken advantage of the impasse to attack stranded or rerouted trucks. Gunmen torched 70 fuel tankers and killed a driver in two attacks on Wednesday.
US Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson said in a statement on Wednesday that “we extend our deepest apology to Pakistan and the families of the Frontier Scouts who were killed and injured.”
The US and NATO issued apologies after their investigation found that the Pakistani soldiers fired at the two US helicopters prior to the attack, likely trying to notify the aircraft of their presence after the helicopters entered Pakistani airspace several times.
The head of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, and the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, pledged to work with Pakistan to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The US rarely acknowledges the covert missile strike program.
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