ISLAMABAD, 18 January 2006 — Pakistan cannot accept actions like an airstrike on a village that killed 18 people, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said yesterday as opposition lawmakers denounced the attack and walked out of the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, in protest.
Officials in the tribal zone where the missile landed said separately that the strike was aimed at foreign militants invited to a dinner and that up to five of them were killed — the first such confirmation by Pakistan.
But following weekend protests across Pakistan, visiting former US president and now United Nations special earthquake envoy George Bush said that despite the deaths the United States was trying to help Pakistan.
Aziz told a joint news conference with Bush: “Pakistan is committed to fighting terrorism, but naturally we cannot accept any action within our country which results in what happened over the weekend.
“So the relationship with the United States is important, it is growing, but at the same time such actions cannot be condoned.”
The air raid on Friday in Damadola, a village in the Bajaur tribal agency, targeted Al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, US intelligence sources have said, although Washington has not confirmed it launched the attack.
Pakistan lodged an official protest with the US Embassy on Saturday and thousands of people chanting “Down with America” took to the streets in angry protests in major cities the following day.
Aziz is due to meet current President George W. Bush during his six-day stay. “This incident will also be discussed but communication and meeting each other and exchanging ideas never stopped,” he said.
As opposition members walked out of the National Assembly, they cried, “Shame, Shame.” Outside the house, Maulana Fazlur Rahman of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam said the missile strike was the result of “too much appeasement of the Americans.”
Pakistan People’s Party’s Amin Fahim demanded a house debate on the country’s foreign policy. He said it was high time for the policy planners to make a review of our foreign policy.
As opposition leader after opposition leader criticized the government, members of the treasury benches kept silent.
A majority of the members demanded the formation of a house committee to look into violence in tribal areas, clashes in Balochistan and review of foreign policy.
Some members complained that President Pervez Musharraf took foreign policy initiatives without taking Parliament into confidence.
Officials in Bajaur said yesterday that the strike was aimed at “foreign terrorists”, up to 12 of whom had been invited to a dinner before the attack.
“Foreign” is the official shorthand here for Al-Qaeda and Taleban insurgents.
“According to our information at least four to five foreign elements had also been killed in this incident but their bodies were removed from the scene within no time by their companions,” said an official statement quoting Fahim Wazir, Bajaur’s head of administration. It said that two local militants, Maulana Faqir Mohammad and Maulana Liaqat, removed the bodies of the foreign extremists killed in the attack to “suppress the actual reason of the attack.”
The US counterterrorism coordinator told BBC radio that Washington believes Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden is alive and hiding around the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region.
“We have no intelligence or evidence that indicates that he (Bin Laden) is dead or incapacitated, so our working assumption is that he is still alive,” State Department official Henry Crumpton said.
The United Nations meanwhile said it has closed its offices in southwestern Pakistan for 48 hours after receiving a telephone threat mentioning Al-Qaeda.
An unidentified person issued the “credible” threat on Monday to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, said UN Humanitarian Coordinator Jan Vandemoortele.
— Additional input from agencies
