Pro-govt elder among 7 killed in Dir explosion

Other fatalities include two local councillors

UPPER DIR: At least seven people — including the head of a pro-government peace committee — were killed and three others critically wounded in a roadside bomb attack in a remote district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Monday evening. The deadly blast in the mountainous Doag Dara area of Upper Dir district came after a relatively long lull in terrorist violence in the region.

Peace Committee head Khan Muhammad was travelling with local politicians in the Shringil area, near Badar Kani village, when an improvised explosive device (IED) was remotely detonated by suspected terrorists near their vehicle, police said.

They were returning home after adjudicating a dispute between two tribes over the construction of a road in the area. Seven people were killed on the spot and three were seriously wounded.

Witnesses said the blast was so powerful that it turned the vehicle into a heap of mangled metal and tossed it off the road and into a river. Residents rushed to the spot to fish out the casualties from the river.

One police official claimed the target was, in fact, Malik Mutabar Khan, the head of another peace committee, who was not present in the vehicle at the time of the explosion. “It was just by chance that Malik Mutabar Khan got off the vehicle at a nearby place before the explosion,” the police official, Yar Muhammad, told AFP.

The district police officer confirmed the deadly blast and identified the fatalities as Khan Muhamamd, Adil Khan, Samiullah, Muhammad Khan, Habibullah, Kabir Khan and Muhammad Aman. Three others, who were critically wounded, had been driven to the District Headquarters Hospital.

Residents said Khan Muhammad was also chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party in the district, while Adil Khan was a tehsil councillor, and Kabir was their driver. Security forces mounted a manhunt in the region for the perpetrators.

The deadly attack came a day after a local leader of Pakhtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) was shot dead in Swabi district. Muhammad Shuaib Khan was at his Hujra (guest house) when two gunmen shot him dead. The ANP announced 10-day mourning for its leader.

The outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which has been routed from K-P and tribal regions as a result of a series of military actions, has frequently targeted pro-government elders and nationalist politicians. The group also claimed credit for the latest violence, though a breakaway faction said they carried out the two attacks. It was not possible to independently verify the claim.

Pakistan Army launched a massive operation in North Waziristan, the erstwhile stronghold of homegrown and foreign terrorists, in June 2014. The operation was intensified after the Taliban massacred more than 150 people, majority of them children, at a military-run school in Peshawar in December 2014.

The military announced in May this year it had cleared the last militant stronghold in the strategic Shawal Valley of North Waziristan, in the final phase of the mission.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 19^th, 2016.