Troops stormed Pakistan’s army headquarters yesterday ending a day-long hostage drama and freeing 39 people held by militants who brazenly struck at the heart of the military establishment.
Three hostages, two soldiers and four suspected Taliban militants were killed in a rescue operation hailed by the military as “highly successful”, despite a total of 19 dead since the rebels launched their assault.
Six soldiers and four other militants had already been killed in the nearly 24-hour siege, which began Saturday in the garrison city of Rawalpindi and was the third dramatic militant strike in the nuclear-armed nation in a week.
Tehreek-e-Taliban has claimed responsibility for the brazen attack on the Pakistan Army’s Headquarters in Rawalpindi on Saturday, which left four of its militants and eight soldiers dead, and demanded a halt in ongoing military campaign in the NWFP.
The Amjad Farooqi group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) umbrella grouping claimed that it was behind the audacious attack and demanded that former President Pervez Musharraf be put on trial.
The group took the responsibility in a telephone call made to Geo News. They also asked for closure of all Western NGOs and expulsion of US private security firm Blackwater.
The audacious attack exposed Pakistan’s vulnerability in the face of a Taliban militia who have regrouped after the death of their leader and are determined to thwart an army assault on their tribal hideouts, analysts said.
The latest militant attack in Pakistan shows an “increasing” threat to the state, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in London Sunday, but voiced confidence Islamabad was in control of its nuclear arsenal.
She said the militants’ brazen bid to storm the Pakistani military headquarters in Rawalpindi on Saturday highlighted the scale of the threat faced by Islamabad.
“Yesterday was another reminder that extremists … are increasingly threatening the authority of the state,” she said.
“But we see no evidence that they (the militants) are going to take over the state,” she said at a press conference with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
Military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said troops went in at about 6:00 am (0000 GMT) and met with resistance from five militants armed with suicide vests and barricaded in the building in the city adjoining Islamabad.
“Thirty-nine hostages were rescued and three were killed,” Abbas told AFP, adding that the captives were shot dead by the militants.
“The militants had suicide jackets, improvised explosive devices, grenades… they wanted to blow up all the hostages and cause maximum damage.”
He said that two soldiers and four of the insurgents were killed in the hours-long rescue operation. The apparent leader of the militant team escaped and detonated a number of explosives, before being injured and arrested.
“The operation is over. It was highly successful,” Abbas added.
He said that intelligence officials were investigating possible links between the sole surviving militant — named as Aqeel, also known as Doctor Usman — and the March attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.
The Rawalpindi attack bore similarities to the March gun-and-grenade attack, which left six policemen and two civilians dead. Abbas said the militant held Sunday had the same name and alias as one of the Lahore attack suspects.
The drama unfolded just before midday on Saturday, when nine gunmen in military uniform and armed with automatic weapons and grenades drove up to the compound and shot their way through one checkpost.
Four militants and six soldiers were killed near a second post but the rest of the rebels fled and took the 42 military employees hostage.
There has been no claim of responsibility, but officials immediately blamed the Taliban.
“They are the enemies of Islam and Pakistan. All their actions are against the sovereignty of Pakistan,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on a local television station.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) movement based in the northwest tribal belt and is blamed for most of the attacks that have killed more than 2,200 people in the country in two years.
The weekend siege came after a suicide car bomb on Friday killed 52 civilians at a busy market in the northwest city of Peshawar and an attack on a UN office in Islamabad last Monday left five aid workers dead.
Government ministers blamed the attacks on the Taliban, who have vowed to avenge the death of their leader Baitullah Mehsud in a US drone missile attack in August and are keen to deter an assault on their stronghold.
The military is wrapping up a fierce offensive against Taliban rebels in the northwestern Swat valley launched in April, with the army now poised to begin a similar assault in the nearby semi-autonomous tribal belt near Afghanistan.
Political and defence analyst Hasan Askari said the militant strikes showed the army had not broken the back of the Taliban, as they claim.
“This shows weaknesses in the security arrangements of the state agencies and the determination and commitment of the extremist Taliban,” he told AFP.
Taliban and al-Qaeda rebels who fled Afghanistan after the 2001 US-led invasion have carved out boltholes in the remote Pakistani mountains.
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