Taliban shoot dead 21 of 23 abducted Pak cops

Taliban shoot dead 21 of 23 abducted Pak cops

Peshawar: Pakistani militants, who have escalated attacks in recent weeks, killed at least 41 people in two separate incidents, officials said on Sunday, challenging assertions that military offensives have broken the back of hardline Islamist groups.
    Twenty-one tribal policemen believed to have been kidnapped by the Taliban were found shot to death in Pakistan’s troubled northwest tribal region early on Sunday, government officials said. They found the bodies shortly after midnight in the Jabai area of the frontier region of Peshawar after being notified by one policeman who escaped, said Naveed Akbar Khan, a top political official in the area. Another policeman was found seriously wounded, Khan said.
    Officials said the men were executed one by one. “They were tied up and blindfolded,” Naveed Anwar, a senior administration official, said. “They were lined up and shot in the head,” said Habibullah Arif, another official.
    The 23 policemen disappeared before dawn on Thursday, when militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons attacked two posts in the region. Two other police officers were killed in the attacks.
    Militants lined the officers up on a cricket field late on Saturday night and gunned them down, said another local official.
    Taliban spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan claimed responsibility for the attacks. “We killed all the kidnapped men after a council of senior clerics gave a verdict for their execution. We didn’t make any demand for their release because we don’t spare any prisoners who are caught during fighting,” he said.
    Meanwhile, in a separate incident, 20 Shia pilgrims died and 24 were wounded when a car bomb targeted their bus convoy as it headed toward the Iranian border in the southwest, a doctor said.
    Witnesses said a blast targeted their three buses as they were overtaking a car about 60km west of Quetta, capital of sparsely populated Baluchistan province.
    “The bus next to us caught on fire immediately,” said pilgrim Hussein Ali, 60. “We tried to save our companions, but were driven back by the intensity of the heat.”
    New York-based Human Rights Watch has noted more than 320 Shias killed this year in Pakistan and said attacks were on the rise. It said the governmen’s failure to catch or prosecute attackers suggested it was “indifferent” to the killings.
    Pakistan has repeatedly denied allegations that it supports militant groups like the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network. AGENCIES