BANNU, 3 June 2006 — A suicide attack on a Pakistan Army convoy in Mir Ali village in the troubled tribal region yesterday killed four soldiers and injured eight, military sources told Arab News.
The military convoy was on its way to Miranshah when ambushed. The attacker rammed his vehicle into two army trucks blowing himself up and killing four soldiers instantly. Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan confirmed the four deaths. “The attackers inside the car, we are not very sure whether it was one or two, have also died,” Sultan said.
According to another report, there were two bombers who targeted the military vehicles that had stopped to deal with mechanical problems. “It was a suicide attack. A white car came and rammed into the convoy of security forces,” Sultan told AFP. The injured soldiers were taken to a military hospital in the nearby garrison town of Bannu.
Helicopter gunships and ground troop reinforcements were moved to the area following the attack, a senior security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
This is the first major incident since retired Lt. Gen. Ali Muhammad Jan Aurakzai took over as the new governor of North West Frontier Province. After addressing a grand assembly of tribal chiefs yesterday, the governor told journalists in Peshawar that Osama Bin Laden was not in Pakistan as reported by some US newspapers.
He admitted that some Taleban suspects and Al-Qaeda operatives were present in North Waziristan and the army was fighting to flush them out.
In a separate incident yestertday, police in the southwestern province of Balochistan said they had arrested a prominent militant suspected of involvement in a string of sectarian attacks.
The suspect, Habibullah Zehri, was a member of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, one of the most feared militant groups blamed for attacks on Shiites in Pakistan, police said.
“He was involved in the planning and execution of almost all sectarian killings in Balochistan,” senior provincial police officer Chaudhary Mohammad Yaqub told a news conference late on Thursday.
The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which the government outlawed in August 2001, has links to the Taleban and Al-Qaeda. It has been implicated in several attacks on Western targets since Pakistan joined the US-led war on terrorism.
Smugglers Arrested
Police arrested seven smugglers yesterday accused of supplying weapons and bomb-making material to renegade tribesmen in Balochistan, officials said.
Officers also seized a cache of weapons, including 155 rockets and explosives, during the raid on a home in Quetta, said Salman Syed, a senior police official in the province.
