Badhaber base attack: Dozens picked up as investigation opens

Terrorists sneaked in from Afghanistan via Khyber Agency

KOHAT/ PESHAWAR:

The air around the PAF base in Badhaber was thick and tense on Saturday. A day after a diabolical terror attack that left 43 people, including terrorists, dead at the former NSA surveillance site, dozens of suspects were rounded up and a case was registered against unidentified suspects.

The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) registered the FIR under terrorism charges on the complaint of the Badhaber camp commandant. “The FIR has been registered and the CTD will investigate the matter,” an official of the Badhaber police station confirmed to The Express Tribune.

The Darra Adam Khel chapter of the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) had claimed responsibility for the attack within hours of the brazen assault on the air force’s residential complex near Peshawar.

Search operations

In a search operation launched by the Badhaber police around the airbase, 28 suspects, including some Afghan refugees, were taken into custody for interrogation. Police and security forces also launched joint search operations in the cantonment area and the PAF airbase in Kohat, arresting another 96 suspects with weapons, including repeaters, Kalashnikovs, shotguns and pistols. They were transported to different police stations for interrogation. The detained men included over 20 Afghan citizens and people from the tribal areas.

Speculation surrounding the actual number of attackers also came to an end as one more unidentified body was found inside the base, taking the total number of slain militants to 14.

A military official confirmed the number, saying the bodies had been handed over to the CTD after their fingerprints and all other recognition marks were sent to the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) for identification.

The bodies were later buried in one grave in Jani Khwar near Surzai village on the outskirts of Peshawar. A police official, requesting anonymity, told The Express Tribune the corpses were taken from the Khyber Medical College and buried in a large burrow dug up with an excavator.

Listing down the items found with the attackers killed inside the base, an official privy to the investigation said 11 submachine guns and 77 cartridges were recovered after the gun battle ended. Another six rocket-propelled grenades (RPG), along with a launcher, 28 hand grenades and 19 improvised explosive devices, were found in six bags, giving credence to the speculation the “attackers wanted to keep fighting for long”.

While intelligence agencies have been busy tracing the whereabouts of the attackers and the way the assault was planned, all fingers have been pointed towards Afghanistan.

“The communication of the attackers has all been traced to Nangarhar,” an intelligence official told The Express Tribune. “The attack was executed by the Qari Saifullah group [of the TTP],” he added.

There was evidence, he said, to believe the militants had travelled from Khyber Agency (where a search operation was launched a night before) and used the route from Kagawala, a village adjacent to the base to reach the spot to launch the attack.

How the attack was executed

Explaining how the attackers stormed the base, the official said that while eight attackers were killed in the first encounter with security forces after they breached the outer cordon, “we tried to save the residential complex first”. “It would have been a catastrophe had they managed to reach the residences,” he said, adding that two attackers had managed to escape towards the mosque. “If it had not been prayers time, there would have been far lesser casualties” he said.

The official’s version corresponds to the accounts of eyewitness who told The Express Tribune that people were preparing to offer prayers when the militants opened indiscriminate fire. “We ducked to save our lives,” one witness said. “It was then that a hand grenade was lobbed,” he said, adding that when they tried to escape after the grenade attack another attacker hurled a second hand grenade.

Prior warnings

While there were prior intelligence reports about a possible attack at the base, security officials believed the timing of the attack during the morning prayers time resulted in a high number of deaths.

A police official said two alerts were issued on September 3 and September 8, respectively, by intelligence agencies that warned around 12 terrorists had been sent from Afghanistan. A more specific warning issued on September 8 stated the terrorists planned on attacking PAF residential areas.

Every day Peshawar faces around 19 threat alerts that are routinely tackled through a coordinated effort by all intelligence agencies, which have carried out more than 1,095 intelligence-based operations this year alone, senior officials said. But as one official pointed out: “Militants on suicide missions are meant to inflict damage, and there is only one thing that can be done: damage control.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2015.