Friday, January 13, 2006

U.S. airstrike on Pakistani Village Reported

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - A local lawmaker said a U.S. airstrike on a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan on Friday killed at least 17 people, including women and children. The American military said it had no reports of an attack.

Pakistani security and army officials said a rocket from the Afghan side of the border hit a house in the village of Damadola in the Bajur tribal area, about four miles inside Pakistan and some 125 miles southeast of Islamabad.

Islamic militants from groups like al-Qaida, the Taliban and the militia of renegade Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are believed to be active in the area.

In Kabul, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Mike Cody said he had no reports on the attack - which would be the second such deadly strike on targets inside Pakistan within a week.

In Afghanistan's eastern province of Kunar, which borders Bajur, deputy provincial governor Noor Mohammed denied the strike was launched from within Afghanistan.

"I have been in touch with all the security forces in Kunar and no one has heard about this," he said. "I don't think it's true the rocket came from within Afghanistan."

An army official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the house targeted in the strike belonged to Gul Zaman, a Bajur elder.

Sahibzada Haroon ur Rashid, a lawmaker for Bajur from a hard-line Islamic party who visited the scene of the attack, told The Associated Press that villagers said they "saw a spy plane guiding jet fighters which fired missiles at the home of Gul Zaman."

He said three homes inside a compound in the village had been destroyed and the dead included women and children, who were buried in a mass grave.

Rashid demanded Pakistan's government explain who was behind the attack. He said local residents would stage a protest Saturday.

"Our people say Americans did it. If it is true, then Pakistan should lodge a strong protest with the U.S. government for killing innocent people," he said.

Mohammed Karim, a doctor from a hospital in Bajur, said 17 or 18 people were killed and two were wounded.

Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said it would take time to determine what caused the explosions.

Last Saturday, an attack on a cleric's home elsewhere on the porous and often ill-defined border killed eight people. Local tribesmen blamed U.S. forces for the deaths, and Pakistan's government protested to the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

Pakistani tribal elders claimed last week's airstrike in the North Waziristan tribal region, about 125 miles southwest of Bajur, was launched by American helicopters that then landed inside Pakistan and took away five tribesmen. The U.S. military denied it had bombed the area.

Last month, a senior al-Qaida suspect from Egypt, Hamza Rabia was killed in North Waziristan. Pakistan denied residents' claims that he died in a U.S. missile strike.

Pakistan, a key ally of the United States in its war on terror, says it does not allow the 20,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan to operate on its soil.

Pakistan has placed about 70,000 of its own troops along its border with Afghanistan to weed out alleged al-Qaida and Taliban sympathizers and militants.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060113/D8F3T83G0.html

No comments: