Bajaur attack: Blast kills 8, including Salarzai tribal elder

Four of the deceased were volunteers of pro-government lashkar, Taliban claim responsibility for latest assault.

PESHAWAR:

A suicide attack in Bajaur Agency on Saturday left at least eight people dead and 11 others injured. The deceased included a senior tribal elder of a pro-government lashkar, Malik Tehsil Khan.

Tehsil Khan’s nephew, Malik Sardar, who was among those injured in the attack, said that a 16- to 17-year-old boy approached him and his uncle, Malik Tehsil Khan, and blew himself up, reported Express 24/7.

According to tribal sources, the attack took place in the Pashat area of Salarzai tehsil of Bajaur Agency around 10:30 am. Malik Tehsil Khan, a senior leader of the Salarzai Qaumi Lashkar, was at a restaurant in Pashat Bazaar area, when a suicide bomber blew him up.

Sources told The Express Tribune that four of the deceased were volunteers of the lashkar, while the others were civilians. They said that Malik Tehsil was the target of the attack.

The blast took place some 35 kilometres north of the agency headquarters in Khar, close to the border of Dir district.

The restaurant and nearby shops were also destroyed in the attack.

This was the second attack on the elders of Salarzai Qaumi Lashkar in a month.

Earlier, on April 23, Salarzai Qaumi Lashkar chief Malik Munsib Khan and three of his senior lieutenants Malik Mohammad Akbar, Malik Mohibullah and Malik Sherzada were killed in a suicide attack in Sarghona area when they were returning from a jirga.

Salarzai lashkar, one of the prominent anti-Taliban militias, was set up in August 2008 by a retired Bajaur Levies major, Haji Fazl Karim Baro.

Taliban militants, who have targeted members of the pro-government Salarzai tribe in the past because they raised a village force to drive them out of the region, claimed responsibility for Saturday’s suicide attack.

“We carried out the bombing against the peace committee because they had joined the government and were maligning the Taliban,” Tehreek-e-Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told a news agency.

“We had warned them before and warn them again that they should disband this anti-Taliban peace committee otherwise we will continue to attack them till they are totally eliminated,” Ehsan said.

In the country’s first known female suicide attack, a woman wearing a bomb under her burqa struck near a UN food distribution point in Khar on December 25, killing 43 people. The Salarzai tribe was again the target.

Security forces have carried out a series of military operations against the Taliban and other militants in Bajaur since August 2008. The military has claimed repeatedly to have eliminated the militant threat.

More than 4,400 people have been killed across the country in attacks blamed on the Taliban and other extremist networks based in the tribal belt since the Lal Masjid operation in Islamabad in 2007.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 29^th, 2011.