From rxpgnews.com
Sunday Times busts Pakistan claims on madrassa killings
By RxPG News Service,
Nov 27, 2006 - 6:29:59 PM
Islamabad, Nov 27 - It is the US that carried out last month's bombing of an Islamic seminary in Pakistan in which 82 people were killed, British newspaper The Sunday Times has reported, contradicting the government's stance.
The report by prominent journalist Christina Lamb, carried by the Daily Times Monday, is likely to heighten a row that has pitted the Pakistan government against most political parties and the country's powerful clergy.
The Bajaur madrassa near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border was bombed when Prince Charles of Britain was visiting Pakistan. There were allegations that it was being used to train suicide bombers.
President Pervez Musharraf ridiculed the charge by political parties and the clergy, saying there was enough evidence that the seminary was used to train militants. He claimed that Pakistani security forces carried out the attack.
Lamb's report challenges this.
'We thought it would be less damaging if we said we did it rather than the US,' Lamb quoted an unnamed 'key aide' to Musharraf as saying. 'But there was a lot of collateral damage and we've requested the Americans not to do it again.'
Americans are believed to have attacked the seminary after a tip off that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of Al Qaeda, was present there.
Locals claimed the victims included boys as young as 12 and that the tribal area had been negotiating with the Pakistan government for a peace deal.
Pakistani officials insist they were shown satellite images of people training and have checked the identity cards of all those killed and that all were adults, Lamb writes.
The Pakistani military said on the day of the incident that about 80 'suspected Taliban sympathisers' were killed in the raid near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Officials denied that children had been killed.
The attack sparked a number of protests across the country. Besides religious leaders, those who protested include political parties like Pakistan People's Party and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz as well as the Awami National Party.
The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal -, Pakistan's principal rightwing Islamist political alliance, has been articulating a survey by its lawmaker from Bajaur that those dead were schoolchildren, some even less than 10 years.
In an apparently retaliatory attack Nov 7, a suicide bomber killed at least 42 soldiers at a military training base in Dargai in Northwest Frontier Province. The attack occurred at 8.40 a.m. when fresh recruits were undergoing training in Punjab Regiment's Training Centre.
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