WANA, 31 March 2004 — Militants on the Afghan border shot dead two Pakistani hostages, a government official said yesterday, a day after the military said it had killed an Al-Qaeda spy chief. The deaths heighten tension on Pakistan’s remote Afghan border where about 5,000 troops attacked 400 to 500 Al-Qaeda and other fighters in a 12-day offensive that ended on Sunday with more than 100 people dead.
The hostages, among 14 kidnapped government men, were found in a ditch near a well late on Monday, shot in the head and chest, close to Wana in rugged South Waziristan where they worked as district officials, the military said.
“They were unarmed,” Mahmood Shah, the region’s security chief, told Reuters. The other 12 hostages, all paramilitary troops, were released unharmed on Sunday.
The military said on Monday a spy chief in Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, identified only as “Abdullah”, was among 63 militants killed in the raid, but the government has yet to find his body or fully confirm his identity.
But the military said yesterday the man was only a local-level intelligence official.
“He is not the Al-Qaeda intelligence chief but he was the local intelligence boss,” said military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan.
Pakistani intelligence received radio intercepts indicating the man was an Egyptian and was in charge of communication equipment in the compound where Pakistani tribesmen had sheltered Al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters, Shah said.
But some intercepts suggested the man may have been a courier, Shah said.
The sweep of Pakistan’s tribal belt, involving 50,000 troops, is the biggest in the semiautonomous territory and has netted 167 militants, including 73 foreign fighters. At least 46 soldiers were killed along with more than a dozen civilians.
US forces are hunting on the other side of the border in what the Americans have called a “hammer and anvil” operation. Militants linked to Al-Qaeda are widely believed to be behind bomb blasts in Madrid this month that killed 190.
Heavy resistance at the start of the offensive suggested tribesmen were helping to protect a “high-value target”, maybe Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman Al-Zawahri.
The military later dismissed that as “guesswork”. But officials say a wounded Uzbek Al-Qaeda leader, Tahir Yuldashev, was on the run somewhere along the mountainous border, describing the man as Al-Qaeda’s 10th most senior member.
The discovery of the two dead hostages follows last week’s grisly execution of eight soldiers taken hostage by militants in an ambush of an army convoy. The men were also shot in the head and chest and dumped in a ditch, their hands bound.
“The two hostages were found shot in much the same way as the eight soldiers,” said Shah. He said it was unclear when the men had been killed but tribal sources said they appeared to have been shot soon after the fighting started on March 16.
President Pervez Musharraf, accused by Islamic hard-liners of pandering to Washington at the expense of Pakistani Muslims in the tribal operation, has blamed Al-Qaeda militants with links to the Afghan border area for two attempts on his life in December. Pakistan, which backed the US war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, had come under pressure for not doing enough to root out militants blamed for a wave of violence in Afghanistan.
From Bin Laden and his right-hand man to Al-Qaeda spies of varying seniority, the top scalps in the hunt for terror suspects on Pakistan’s wild Afghan border are eluding thousands of troops sweeping the area.
The top prize is Bin Laden himself — the suspected architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and chief of Al-Qaeda, the network blamed for a spate of horrifying attacks in Madrid this month to the resort island of Bali in Indonesia in 2002.
Pakistan maintains that Bin Laden and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda are not on Pakistani soil and that the troops deployed along its Afghan frontier are there to flush out militants regardless of their seniority.
Bin Laden’s whereabouts — or even if he is actually alive — remain a mystery. A video purporting to be of the Al-Qaeda leader surfaced at Al-Jazeera television on the anniversary last year of the Sept.11 attacks, but its authenticity was hotly debated.
Local journalists say Al-Qaeda fighters slipped through the net several times last year because local people warned them the army was coming.
The capture or death of Yuldashev or Zawahri — an Egyptian doctor with a $25 million price on his head — would be a coup for US President George W. Bush in his campaign to keep allies onside in the war on terror after the Madrid train bombings.
