Islamabad, Jan 24 (DPA) Pakistani officials said Sunday that Taliban militants in the lawless North Waziristan tribal district killed six people for allegedly working as US informers.
Bodies of five men, who had been shot several times, were discovered in a remote village located near the border between North and South Waziristan tribal badlands Sunday.
Notes found with the bodies accused the men of spying for the US. “Anyone spying on the Taliban will face a similar fate,” a government official quoted the notes as saying.
The body of a sixth man apparently killed for the same reasons was found near Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan.
Authorities suspect the men were killed overnight and their bodies were dumped by the roadside as a warning to the local population.
Islamist militants have executed many suspected spies in the past, but the weekend deaths came as the US had intensified aerial strikes in the region after a December 30 suicide bombing at a base in eastern Afghanistan killed seven US intelligence.
The Jordanian bomber had close links with Pakistani insurgents, as in his farewell video message he was seen sitting beside Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.
The tribal belt is considered a sanctuary of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, who regularly carry out cross-border assaults on the Western troops fighting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
Thousands of Taliban insurgents, including several foreign Al Qaeda members, are thought to have fled into North Waziristan and its nearby districts after the security forces launched an offensive mid-October to dismantle their network in South Waziristan.
Separately, one paramilitary soldier was killed and at least two more were wounded when a rocket propelled grenade hit their vehicle in the Khyber tribal region near the Afghan border Sunday, officials said.
