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29 March 2024

41 dead as suicide blast hits northwest Pakistan

Published
By AFP
A massive suicide bomb hit northwest Pakistan killing 41 people Monday, as the military geared up for an assault on Taliban rebels blamed for increasingly bloody and brazen attacks.

The bomber flung himself at a paramilitary convoy passing through a busy market in Shangla, a northwest district near Swat valley where the army claimed to have flushed out Taliban rebels after an offensive launched in April.

But Islamist extremist groups appear far from quashed, with an audacious raid on army headquarters over the weekend leaving 22 people dead and underscoring the vulnerability of the nuclear-armed nation.

The Al-Qaeda-linked Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) movement, holed up in the lawless northwest tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the day-long hostage drama near Islamabad, and vowed more attacks.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the Shangla blast, but the suicide bombing bore all the hallmarks of a TTP strike, and hit in a one-time stronghold of fugitive Swat Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah.

"Forty-one people were killed and 45 were injured in the suicide blast," said Mian Iftekhar Hussain, information minister for the North West Frontier Province. "Twelve of the injured are in a serious condition."

He told AFP that six of the dead were military personnel and the rest civilians. Major Mushtaq Khan, a spokesman at the military-run Swat Media Centre, said: "It was a suicide blast. The attacker was on foot."

Fazlullah Khan, a Shangla member of parliament, told the private Geo television channel that the attacker struck in a crowded bazaar in Alpuri town, but he said the bomber drove an explosives-laden car into the convoy.

The military launched their offensive in and around Swat valley after Taliban militants bent on imposing a harsh brand of Islamic law advanced to within 100 kilometres of Islamabad.

Military and government officials have vowed to follow up the Swat offensive with a full ground assault on the northwest tribal belt, with air strikes late Sunday and early Monday hitting Taliban strongholds there.

The latest in a months-long series of air raids designed to soften up the rebels came after Taliban gunmen staged an audacious daytime attack on the military command centre on Saturday.

In total, eight militants, 11 soldiers and three hostages were killed in the crisis that unfolded at the heart of the military establishment in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, which ended with a commando raid Sunday.

Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq on Monday claimed that attack, telling an AFP reporter by telephone: "It was carried out by our Punjab branch... We have the capability to strike at any place in Pakistan."

The TTP have also claimed a suicide bomb that killed five UN workers at their offices in Islamabad last Monday, but did not comment on a suicide car car bomb Friday that killed 52 people in the northwestern capital Peshawar.

The army said it was now awaiting orders to stage a full-scale offensive on the Pakistani Taliban seat of power in South Waziristan, a rugged mountainous region bordering Afghanistan which lies outside direct government control.

"We are waiting for government orders... The government has decided in principle to launch an operation against Taliban in Waziristan," a military spokesman told AFP.

Analysts say that an operation in Waziristan will be a tougher task then flushing militants out of Swat, with the Taliban entrenched in a hostile terrain and able to slip easily across the Afghan frontier.

Officials said that war planes bombed known militant bases late Sunday in South Waziristan's Makeen and Ladha towns. A security official in the area, who did not want to be named, said that 19 militants were killed in the strikes.

In Bajaur further north, meanwhile, local government official Manasib Khan told AFP that Taliban mountain-top hideouts and underground cave networks were struck by military jets early Monday, killing 12 militants.

 

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