Suicide bomber kills 41 Pakistani recruits
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – A suicide bomber detonated explosives on a field filled with army recruits doing exercises in northwest Pakistan Wednesday, killing at least 41 soldiers and wounding dozens in one of the worst such attacks in Pakistan’s recent history.
Officials immediately blamed the bombing on al-Qaida and local Islamic extremists. They said it appeared to be an act of reprisal for a government missile attack Oct. 30 that killed 82 people at an Islamic school in the nearby Bajaur tribal region, which officials suspected was being used as a training camp for guerrillas.
“It seems that this was linked to the action by our forces against militants in Bajaur last week. Al-Qaida and its followers in this region are getting desperate because of our actions,” Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao said from Islamabad, the capital. “I am afraid this is a beginning of a new phase of terrorism in Pakistan. The terrorists are now pitched directly against our security forces.”
Military officials said the bomber, wrapped in a cloak, wandered onto the unguarded training field and detonated explosives before anyone noticed him. They said a second intended suicide bomber escaped on a motorbike from the military training camp, located in Dargai village near the semiautonomous tribal areas that border eastern Afghanistan.
Several hours later, a man called the office of Geo television in Peshawar, the provincial capital of North-West Frontier Province. He identified himself as the second suicide bomber and claimed that the first attack had been carried out by local insurgents from the Islamic Taliban movement, which operates on both sides of the border.
“Our martyr has clearly stated that this attack is our response to the Pakistan army attack in Bajaur,” the caller said in Afghan Pashto, according to journalists at Geo. “This attack marks the end of our commitment not to target the Pakistan army. We have enrolled 275 people as suicide bombers, and now they will take revenge.”
Dargai is a stronghold of a banned Islamic militant group, the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, which ran the religious school that was bombed by the military in Bajaur. The group has been fighting government troops in the tribal areas for months and was banned in 2002 after trying to impose Taliban-style rule in the tribal areas.
After Wednesday’s attack, security was heightened at all military facilities in Pakistan and soldiers in the northwest region were told not to visit public places in uniform, a senior army official said. On Tuesday, the North-West Frontier provincial governor was forced to cut short a visit to the South Waziristan tribal area when two rockets were fired near a meeting he was attending with local elders.