Islamabad, July 1 (Inditop.com) Militants killed 18 of their own wounded men whom they could not take along while retreating from an area in the restive Swat valley, the Pakistani army has said.
“We have received information that during the clearance of Biha valley, 18 wounded terrorists who could not be taken to safety were slaughtered by their own men on the orders of their commanders,” Dawn quoted the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) as saying Tuesday.
It said that parents of youths, who had been forcibly taken away by the terrorist group led by Baitullah Mehsud for suicide training in South Waziristan, had demanded release of their sons. But Mehsud “refused to free them”.
South Waziristan is the headquarters of Baitullah Mehsud, who heads the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the umbrella group of various Taliban groups operating in the country.
Mehsud is also accused of having a hand in the Dec 27, 2007, gun and bomb attack that killed former prime minister Benazir Bhutto as she left a political rally in the garrison town of Rawalpindi adjacent to Islamabad.
The army has been battling the militants since April 26 after the Taliban reneged on a controversial peace deal with the North West Frontier Province government and instead moved south from their Swat headquarters and occupied Buner, which is just 100 km from Islamabad.
The operations had begun in Lower Dir, the home district of Taliban-backed radical cleric Sufi Mohammad, who had brokered the peace deal and who is the father-in-law of Swat Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah. They later spread to Buner and Swat – and to South Waziristan earlier this month.
The military operations have displaced 3.8 million civilians from the three districts of NWFP.
