ISLAMABAD, 16 July 2007 — Suicide attacks on a military convoy and a police recruitment center killed scores of people in Pakistan yesterday as militants in the country’s northwest scrapped a 10-month-old peace deal with the government.
A suicide bomber killed at least 26 people and wounded 60 more at a police recruitment center in Dera Ismail Khan in northwest Pakistan.
The attack raised to nearly 70 the death toll from strikes that have rocked Pakistan since Saturday, after hard-liners called for holy war following last week’s storming of the pro-Taleban Red Mosque in Islamabad.
“It was a suicide attack,” senior police officer Sharif Virk said after the blast in Dera Ismail Khan. The death toll was expected to rise as about a dozen of the wounded were in critical condition, said local hospital chief Jahan Zeb Khan.
Bloody human remains and parts of the suicide belt were scattered across the hall where recruits had arrived for medical check-ups and other formalities, as wailing relatives crowded the center.
Police superintendent Rab Nawaz, speaking hours after the attack, said that “the death toll has risen to 26.” At least 13 policemen were among those killed, he said. “The others were recruits and their relatives.”
Earlier, in the town of Matta in the Swat Valley, located in the same mountainous province, suicide bombers in two explosives-packed cars hit a Pakistan Army convoy, killing at least 18 people, including 12 security personnel.
On Saturday, a man killed 24 people when he rammed his car into a paramilitary convoy in the tribal region of North Waziristan. That attack was staged 20 km from Miranshah, the main town of the region.
Militants there announced yesterday that they were breaking a 10-month old peace deal with the government. A document handed out to people in the bazaar of Miranshah said the agreement was being terminated because government forces had attacked the militants, failed to pay compensation to those harmed and created problems at check points.
The document’s authenticity was verified by a militant spokesman, Abdullah Farhad, who called journalists in the main northwestern city of Peshawar.
The document, signed by the Shoura, or council, of North Waziristan, warned local militia and elders against cooperating with the government. The signatories referred to themselves as the Taleban, a term commonly used by some Pakistani militants in northwest Pakistan.
“The peace agreement has ended,” Farhad said.
He said the Taleban chief in North Waziristan, Maulvi Gul Badahar, made the decision at a council meeting after the government had failed to abide by its demand that it withdraw troops from checkpoints by 4 p.m. yesterday.
Under the Sept. 5, 2006 truce, soldiers manning security posts throughout the region returned to their barracks and militants agreed to no longer take part in attacks in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Militants were also prevented from fanning extremism.
The earlier presence of Pakistani troops had angered fiercely independent tribesmen and sparked a violent anti-government campaign that killed hundreds of soldiers, militants and civilians.
Following its decision to join the US war on terror in 2001, Pakistan sent some 90,000 troops to the northwest.
While the agreement ended much of the violence, critics said the truce gave the militants a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on Afghan, US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Pakistani officials countered that the pact helped soften militancy by letting tribal leaders in the North Waziristan region police their own people, rather than using violent military operations.
The US national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, expressed concern yesterday about the threat from militants in Pakistan, but supported President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s recent moves to respond.
Pakistan has begun increasing military forces in the northwest to counter the Taleban, and it has deployed thousands of troops to the region to thwart calls by extremists for a holy war to avenge the bloody storming of the Red Mosque.
“We are supporting that effort in order to get control of the situation,” Hadley said on a political talk show on the ABC network.
He said that it was clear that Pakistan’s truce had failed. “There was an agreement with the tribal chiefs that President Musharraf reached, which has not worked the way he wanted,” Hadley said.
— Additional input from agencies
