LAHORE/ISLAMABAD, 24 March 2006 — Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf yesterday warned foreign Al-Qaeda militants to quit Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan otherwise his forces would kill them. “We will never tolerate foreign terrorists and extremists” hiding in the tribal region, Musharraf told a rally in the eastern city of Lahore.
“These foreign militants are indulging in acts of terrorism not only in Pakistan but elsewhere in the world also,” he said. “I warn them to leave Pakistan, failing which we will eliminate them,” he said.
Hundreds of suspected Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters have sneaked across the mountainous border from Afghanistan in the past four years, finding support from conservative tribal groups in the rugged North and South Waziristan regions.
Pakistan, a key ally in the US-led “war on terror,” deployed more than 80,000 troops along the border in 2003 and launched military operations in the tribal areas killing and capturing hundreds of militants.
Pakistan also strongly protested the killing by Afghan troops of 16 men who Islamabad says were its nationals. Afghanistan said the victims were Taleban militants who crossed the frontier from Pakistan, but Islamabad maintains they were Pakistani tribesmen who were on their way to celebrate the Afghan New Year. Tuesday’s incident, for which both sides offered conflicting accounts, came amid an ongoing dispute between the two countries over security along their rugged border.
“The Afghan ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Office here today and we have lodged a strong protest with him,” Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam told Agence France Presse in Islamabad, adding that it had demanded an investigation and the punishment of those responsible.
Tasnim said the victims were civilian Pakistanis who were arrested in Kabul at an unknown time and then handcuffed, tied up and brought to the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak in Kandahar province before being killed nearby.
The Afghan soldiers killed the Pakistani civilians in a “fake encounter,” Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao was earlier quoted by private ARYONE television as saying. “They were the residents of Chaman and had gone to Afghanistan for Naurouz (Afghan New Year) celebrations,” Sherpao said.
Thousands of angry tribesmen watched over by paramilitary soldiers gathered in Chaman, which is just over the border from Spin Boldak, for the funerals of eight of the dead. Three others were buried in the southwestern city Quetta. In Kabul, Afghanistan’s foreign ministry said authorities had launched an investigation and that it was “premature” to discuss the issue until the probe was completed.
Meanwhile, thousands of protesters condemned Musharraf yesterday for not pressing Denmark to apologize over the controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). The rally, which was convened by the Jamaat-e-Islami in the garrison city of Rawalpindi near the capital to observe Pakistan Day, turned into an anti-Musharraf and anti-US protest. More than 3,000 people attended the rally.
