Posted on 06/18/2004 5:53:30 PM PDT by blam
Bin Laden ally killed in rocket attack
By Ahmed Rashid in Islamabad and Peter Foster in New Delhi
(Filed: 19/06/2004)
Pakistan claimed a major victory against terrorism last night when it announced the death of a warlord believed to have sheltered al-Qa'eda fighters on the border with Afghanistan.
Nek Mohammed, a former Taliban commander in his twenties, was killed on Thursday night by rocket and mortar fire as he hid in a mud-walled fortress in the hills outside Wana, in South Waziristan, Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan, an army spokesman, said.
Mohammed's death removes a thorn from the side of President Pervaiz Musharraf, who has been under US pressure to tackle the militants in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas.
A western diplomat said Mohammed was "directly or indirectly" responsible for more than 400 deaths.
Mohammed, a member of the lawless Ahmedzai Wazir tribe, had a devoted militia comprising Taliban and foreign guerrillas.
For the past six months he had defied requests by the Pakistan government to hand over his fighters.
To the Americans' dismay, Pakistan offered him an amnesty if he came down from the hills.
A deal was signed on April 24 at a large public ceremony at which Mohammed received garlands of flowers from the same Pakistani soldiers who orchestrated his death this week.
No one was surprised when Mohammed reneged on the deal and refused to hand over his men for "registration".
• An Afghan interpreter was killed and two American soldiers wounded in a mine attack on a convoy in the southern Afghan province of Paktika
Is today going to go into the record books as the day of fiction!
A-worthless-grease-spot-in-the-annals-of-history Bump.
Good. Now he can speak directly to Osama, whom also currently and since December 2001, resides in hell.....
Every dead terrorist yields a safer world. I can't imagine how many terrorist attacks have been thwarted on account of the thousands of terrorists killed these past few years.
I'd almost think we had Isreali's doing the targeting--this is becoming nice and frequent. Keep it up and sprinkle the bacon grease.
Agreed. He was toast. Hyper-baric 2000lbs bombs have a way of doing that.
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