ISLAMABAD, 1 November 2006 — President Pervez Musharraf said yesterday that the 80 people killed in a raid on a religious school near the Afghan border were all militants undergoing training.
The comments were Musharraf’s first since Monday’s airstrike in a tribal region. Angry local tribesmen say the dead were innocent students.
“They were militants doing military training. We were watching them for the last six or seven days — we knew exactly who they were, what they were doing,” Musharraf told a security conference in Islamabad. “They were all militants using weapons, doing military training within the compound.”
Musharraf added: “Anyone who says that these people were innocent Taleban (religious students) is telling lies.”
The army said that around 80 suspected militants were inside the Al-Qaeda-linked compound in the Bajaur tribal region when helicopter gunships destroyed it in a pre-dawn attack on Monday.
The army action has triggered protests across the country. Thousands of gun-wielding tribesmen protested yesterday chanting “Death to Bush” and “Death to Musharraf” in the troubled Bajaur tribal region.
Speakers at the rally in Khar, the main town in Bajaur, said the dead were all young students and accused the Pakistani government and its ally the United States of murder.
The leaders in this pocket of support for Al-Qaeda and the Taleban accused US forces of either ordering the strike on the madrasa or of actually carrying out the raid using Predator drones.
“It was the Americans who fired a missile on the madrasa and later Pakistani helicopters came to take the responsibility for the Americans’ act,” Haroon Rashid, a parliamentarian from a religious party, told AFP in Khar. “I live just one kilometer away from the madrasa and witnessed everything,” added Rashid, who said he had resigned from politics in protest.
However, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, the chief army spokesman, said American forces did not take part in Monday’s attack on the religious school.
Sultan admitted that the Pakistan Army received an intelligence report from the US Army. “Intelligence sharing was definitely there, but to say they (the coalition) have carried out the operation, that is absolutely wrong,” Sultan told Associated Press, adding, “One doesn’t know ... what was the percentage of help (was provided).” Sultan later contacted the AP to deny he had made the remarks.
Officials say Bajaur is a hotspot for militants fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan’s Kunar province. Al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri was targeted in a failed CIA missile strike here in January.
Among those killed in Monday’s raid was Maulana Liaquat, a local Taleban commander who ran the madrasa and who is known to be a close associate of Zawahiri, security officials said.
Liaquat was killed along with his three sons in the attack. He belonged to the banned pro-Taleban Tehrike Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammadi, which had sent 3,000 tribal volunteers to fight the US forces in Afghanistan. Monday’s operation also threatened a peace deal that Maulana Liaquat and the surviving chief of the banned Islamic movement, Maulana Faqir Mohammad, had agreed to sign with the pro-US government the same day.
It was supposed to be similar to the one the tribes of the semi-autonomous North Waziristan region signed last month that allowed them their traditional freedoms in return for a guarantee that they would not help the Taleban and Al-Qaeda elements across the border in Afghanistan.
NWFP Chief Minister Akram Durrani said he did not think the Bajaur bloodshed would upset the North Waziristan agreement, but said “bombing is no solution.” His most-senior minister, Sirajul Haq, had already resigned in protest. Meanwhile, veteran Afghan leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is believed to be organizing resistance against the US forces in Kunar province, predicted in a four-page statement that Afghanistan will prove to be “a third Vietnam for the United States after Iraq.” The NWFP Assembly set aside routine work yesterday to debate the attack. Some speakers alleged that the US carried out the attack to sabotage the peace deal with the Bajaur tribes.
US television channel ABC News reported Monday that a US Predator drone had fired the missiles that destroyed the madrasa.
Around four missiles were fired at the concrete-walled compound, reducing much of it to rubble. Dozens of mangled bodies covered in sheets were laid out on makeshift beds for funeral prayers before being buried.
— With input from agencies
