The Taliban killed 14 people in a suicide attack in Swat, while further south, gunmen killed an anti-Taliban tribal leader in the provincial capital of Peshawar.
The suicide bomber detonated his explosives at a police checkpoint in the town of Saidu Sharif outside Mingora, the main town in Swat. The bomber attempted to enter a building used by police and the military, but failed.
“The suicide bomber was on foot,” a senior police official told AFP. “He was trying to enter the building and blew himself up after being stopped by police.”
In the attack, 14 Pakistanis, including two policemen, a soldier, and a child, were killed, and more than 50 were wounded. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
Further south, in Peshawar, the capital of the Northwest Frontier Province, the Taliban assassinated a pro-government tribal leader who has battled the Taliban in the Mohmand tribal agency.
Taliban fighters gunned down Haji Lal Badshah and two of his bodyguards as they traveled to his home in the city. Badshah had led a local lashkar, or tribal militia, in the Mohmand tribal agency, a Taliban stronghold.
Today’s attacks cap a week of renewed Taliban violence in the Northwest and in Pakistan’s major cities. Today’s suicide attack in Swat is the fourth this week. Yesterday two suicide bombers killed more than 50 people in an attack in a military cantonment in the eastern city of Lahore. On March 11, a suicide bomber detonated his vest prematurely in Peshawar, killing five people. The bomber was targeting a Frontier Corps convoy as it passed through a checkpoint. On March 8, a suicide bomber targeted the headquarters of the Federal Investigation Agency in Lahore and killed 11 people. The headquarters building later collapsed.
The military has claimed that the Taliban’s leadership has been dismantled and that the movement is disjointed and unable to conduct operations after the military’s offensives in Swat, Bajaur, South Waziristan, Peshawar, and Khyber. But the Taliban have regrouped in North Waziristan, Arakzai, Mohmand, Khyber, Kurram, and regions in South Waziristan still under Taliban control, and the top Taliban leaders remain free. The Taliban retain their capacity to strike at military, government, and local targets. Tribal leaders who oppose the Taliban have been ruthlessly targeted.
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kinda off topic a bit, but i just read this article and i remembered this guys name from an earlier lwj article as the guy who filed a petition on behalf of baradar. though some on here might want to read it:
A former Inter-Services Intelligence official, considered to have close links with militant groups, has dismissed the Pakistan government’s claim that Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud had been killed in a US drone attack.
“Two of my acquaintances were with Hakimullah Mehsud on March 9 while Interior Minister Rehman Malik and Pakistan Army spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas had claimed he was dead early last month,” former ISI official KHALID KHAWAJA, who now heads a rights group, told PTI.
“I challenge the government to deny my claim and then I will disclose the names of those who were with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan chief on March 9,” Khawaja claimed.
Pakistani and US officials have said they had credible information that Hakimullah Mehsud died after being seriously injured in a US drone attack in January.