ISLAMABAD: Pakistani commandos ended a bloody siege at the army headquarters early Sunday after they stormed a building inside the complex and freed 39 hostages. In the battle with the gunmen, three captives, two commandos and five hostage-takers were killed.
One of the gunmen was captured. He was described by army spokesman Maj. Gen. Ather Abbas as the ringleader. The hostages included soldiers and civilians.
Overall 20 people were killed in the 22-hour siege that began Saturday morning when gunmen wearing army uniforms and riding a Suzuki van eluded security at a checkpoint and managed to enter the army headquarters, killing six soldiers and losing four of their own.
Abbas said 20 hostages were kept in a room guarded by a militant wearing a suicide vest who was shot and killed before he could detonate his explosives.
The only hostage-taker captured was identified by Abbas as Aqeel, alias “Dr. Usman.” He critically wounded himself by setting off explosives he was carrying. Military sources said Aqeel, a native of village Kahuta in the northwest, once worked as a guard at an army nursing school, where he got his nickname. He later joined the Punjab chapter of Tehrik-e-Taleban Pakistan.
Abbas said the man’s name matched that of a militant suspected of orchestrating an attack in Lahore earlier this year on Sri Lanka’s visiting cricket team.
The attack on the tightly guarded army headquarters in the city of Rawalpindi, next door to the capital, Islamabad, came as the military prepared an offensive against the militants in their stronghold of South Waziristan on the Afghan border.
The strike at the heart of the powerful military called into question government assertions the militants were virtually crippled by recent setbacks. But officials said it only underlined the need to finish them off.
“The civilian leadership has decided ... the operation is imminent,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Reuters in an interview in Singapore.
In a signal the military was not deterred, it launched two airstrikes on suspected militant targets in South Waziristan on Sunday evening, ending a five-day lull in attacks there and killing at least five militants, intelligence officials said.
Malik said the militant raid, which bore the hallmarks of several similarly ruthless “swarm” attacks this year, was apparently carried out by Pakistani Taleban and Al-Qaeda.
In March, gunmen attacked Sri Lanka’s cricket team as it drove to a match in the city of Lahore and weeks later militants raided a police cadet college in the same city. Those attacks were blamed on the Pakistani Taleban, widely believed to have been helped by militants from Punjab province.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters in London that the siege showed that militants are “increasingly threatening the authority of the (Pakistani) state, but we see no evidence they are going to take over the state.”
She and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband both said, however, that there was no sign Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was at risk.
A leading analyst said the militants’ ability to invade the heavily guarded army headquarters, even securing uniforms, was evidence they may have infiltrated the security forces. At the very least, he said, it shows the army is constantly forced to play defense.
“The question is, when do they get ahead of the curve where they can actually be in preventative mode?” said Kamran Bokhari, an analyst with Stratfor, a US-based global intelligence firm.
The attack on the army came at the end of a violent week. Last Monday, a suicide bomber attacked a UN office in Islamabad killing five staff members, and on Friday a suspected suicide bomber killed 49 people in Peshawar.
Malik said the planned offensive against the militants in South Waziristan was not a matter of choice, but a necessity. “It is not an issue of commitment, it is becoming a compulsion because there was an appeal from the local tribes that we should do the operation.”
— With input from agencies
