ISLAMABAD/PESHAWAR, 17 June 2006 — Gunmen shot dead two women aid workers and two daughters of one of the women yesterday in a remote area near the Afghan border, a government official said.

The two women ran a community center that taught village women vocational skills in the conservative Orakzai tribal area, where hard-liners, who call themselves Taleban after the Afghan militants, have been growing in strength. “There has been opposition to NGOs in the area,” said district government official Abdul Kamal Khattak, referring to non-governmental organizations. The gunmen fired through a window of the community center, killing the two women and the two girls, Khattak said.

Authorities said one of the victims, Salma Bibi, and her colleague were asleep when the attackers struck.

The gunmen sprayed bullets through the window of the government-funded community school at Khoga Chiri village, local administration officials said. The two girls were aged between three and five, the officials said on condition of anonymity. “The aid workers were appointed about 15 days back at the school and were sleeping in quarters provided to them.”

No one claimed responsibility for the attack and local authorities said they were investigating a number of possibilities.

Mob Kills Teacher

A frenzied mob beat a teacher to death when he tried to help a prayer leader in a row over the alleged desecration of a copy of the Holy Qur’an, a local police chief said yesterday.

The prayer leader was attacked by more than 1,000 people at Hasilpur town in central Punjab province after claims that he desecrated an old copy of the holy book, Nasir Sayal told AFP.

“A retired schoolteacher came in and tried to save the man but he was also severely beaten by the mob and later died in hospital,” he said. Both victims belonged to the hard-line Jamaat-ud-Dawa party, an incarnation of the banned Laskhar-e-Taiba, he added.

Journalist’s Body Found

A Pakistani journalist abducted by gunmen in December after reporting that an Al-Qaeda leader was killed by a US missile was found dead yesterday, a Pakistani government official said. Hayatullah Khan had been shot in the back of the head, probably on Thursday, and dumped in mountains outside the town of Mir Ali, in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border.

“We can confirm it is Hayatullah. He was shot once in the back of the head and was in handcuffs,” the deputy administrator of North Waziristan, Mohammad Fida Khan, told reporters in Mir Ali. The journalist, abducted in Mir Ali on Dec. 5, looked weak and had lost a lot of weight. He also had a long beard, the deputy administrator said.