Targeted killings : Anti-Taliban activist shot dead in Lower Dir

TIMARGARA:

Suspected militants shot dead an anti-Taliban tribal activist in the restive Lower Dir district in the early hours of Sunday, police said.

“Abdur Rehman, also a former nazim of Maidan tehsil, was going to Khro Shago Bazaar in Chinar Kot area when gunmen ambushed him around 7am,” Haider Zaman, the SHO of Lal Qila police station, told The Express Tribune.

Police drove the body to the district headquarters hospital in Timergara for autopsy, registered a case and mounted a manhunt for the killers.

Abdur Rahman, a member of a local peace committee, was affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami and was elected councillor in the 2002 local bodies elections. He had escaped a couple of assassination attempts in the past.

Abdur Rehman is the second anti-Taliban leader to have been killed over the last two days. On Saturday, Saeed Ahmad Khan, a presidential award-winning tribal elder, was killed along with five others in a suicide attack in Buner district.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 5^th, 2012.