ISLAMABAD, 9 April 2007 — Authorities clamped dusk-to-dawn curfew in Kurram tribal region where sectarian clashes continued yesterday despite the army’s efforts to disengage the warring groups. Authorities have threatened military action as fighting spread to rural areas.
The army used helicopter gunships on Saturday to quell fighting between Sunnis and Shiites in Parachinar, the main town in the Kurram region, near the Afghan border. Latest reports suggest fighting between the two groups spread to new areas of Parachinar and nearby villages. There were conflicting reports about the death toll. Some government officials say the toll has reached 50 while others put it at only 15.
Sahibzada Mohammad Anis, the top administrator of Kurram, said tribal elders were trying to defuse the situation but warned of “military action” in the rural areas if fighting did not stop.
He said the battling tribesmen were using heavy weapons including mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Anis said 15 deaths could be confirmed so far, but the toll could be higher. Scores of people had been wounded, he added. Authorities imposed a curfew and called out the army in Parachinar on Friday hours after clashes erupted in a row over a religious procession. Dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed on the Kurram region yesterday.
Sectarian violence has bedeviled Pakistan since the 1980s, and thousands have been killed in tit-for-tat attacks. Men in the ethnic-Pashtun tribal lands typically bear arms, and the Taleban and Al-Qaeda have won support among Sunni Muslims in poorer parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
Meanwhile, four Frontier Constabulary men were injured in Bannu and Tank in two separate incidents.
S. African National’s Body Found
The body of a murdered South African national was found in a plastic bag on the outskirts of Peshawar yesterday, police said. The body of the 26-year-old man was found in the plastic bag — of a type normally used for farming — in Peshawar’s Baboo Garhi suburbs, local police investigator Kachkol Khan told AFP.
According to the passport found in his pocket the man was identified as Kenneth Scott Andrew, a resident of Durban, Khan said, adding that he had entered Peshawar on Jan. 1 this year on tourist visa. Police are now treating the case as murder, Khan said.
Doctors who carried out the postmortem on the body said that the man had no firearm injury or knife wounds and they suspected that he had been given some poisonous material.
