32 militants killed in Pakistan madrasa blast

ISLAMABAD: Thirty-two suspected al Qaeda militants were killed in an explosion in a madrasa in North Waziristan near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

While locals claimed that the blast on Tuesday night in the Dattakhel area of north Waziristan was caused by a missile attack from across the border, Pakistan defence officials asserted that the explosion took place when bombs being made by the militants in the seminary accidentally went off.

Another madrasa and two adjacent houses in Dattakhel area were also destroyed in the explosion. Pakistan’s Defence spokesman Maj Gen Waheed Arshad said that several casualties occurred when bombs being made by militants accidentally exploded. He said the place where the explosions took place was a training facility.

Tribesmen from Dattakhel who reached Miranshah, headquarters of North Waziristan where Taliban and al Qaeda militants were holed up, brought 24 wooden coffins from the market and ordered another 24. Around 50 students and their teachers were present in the Binori madrassa when it was hit and all of them were killed or injured, The News reported.

Casualties were also feared in adjoining two houses. Villagers reported seeing a drone that had flown from Afghanistan in the morning firing two missiles at the seminary and flattening its structure, it said. Hundreds of foreign al Qaeda militants loyal to Osama bin Laden fled into Pakistan’s tribal belt after US-led forces ousted the Taliban regime from Afghanistan in late 2001.

Last year, Pakistan acknowledged that it carried out a missile attack on a madrasa in the tribal belt in which 80 people who were described as militants under training were killed. In the past also, the military authorities have explained similar occurrences as a consequence of explosions accidentally caused by bomb-makers.

The remoteness of the Mami Noma Manzarkhel village made it difficult to get details of the attack. The few telephones in the area, located around 75 km west of Miranshah, were not working. The targeted village, sited 16 km from Dattakhel town in the Sher Ali Ghundai area, is close to the border with Afghanistan. The mud-built Binori Madrassa was located at some distance from the village.

“It was intriguing to note that US helicopters had reportedly dropped leaflets in the border areas of both North Waziristan and South Waziristan last Saturday warning the tribes living there not to launch attacks in Afghanistan. The leaflets in Pashto language threatened them with attacks involving chemical weapons if attacks across the Pak-Afghan border were not stopped and military training camps in Waziristan were not closed,” the newspaper said.