Pakistan defends deadly attack on school

Pakistan’s military had to destroy an Islamic school, killing 80 people in the process, with helicopter-fired missiles to prevent trainee terrorists escaping the building, the army said today as critics denounced the government for using disproportionate force.

Tribal elders said Monday’s devastating attack in north-western Bajur district set back peace efforts in Pakistan’s volatile north-western tribal region.

A prominent human rights group demanded an independent investigation into the air raid.

“A guarantee must be given that there will be no such attack in Bajur. Without it we will not begin talks with the government,” said Abdul Aziz Khan, head of Bajur’s council of tribal chiefs that was negotiating a deal, like one reached in September in North Waziristan, to stamp out militancy.

Fiery protests erupted for a third-straight day in Bajur with 10,000 tribesmen - including armed and masked pro-al Qaida militants – demanding the deaths of Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and his war on terror ally, US President George Bush.

Musharraf’s military-led government has been roundly condemned in Pakistan for the raid on the school in the Bajur village of Chingai, just about two miles from the poorly demarcated border separating Pakistan from eastern Afghanistan’s volatile Kunar province, where US troops battle al Qaida militants almost daily.

Tribespeople and Islamic leaders denounced the raid – which killed 80, tearing most to unrecognisable shreds – as an illegitimate attack on innocent students and teachers and threatened retaliation from protests to suicide bombers.

Many people also blamed the US military for carrying out or providing intelligence for the attack.

Residents reported seeing unmanned drone surveillance aircraft flying over the town. Pakistan officials denied US involvement and claimed they had their own aircraft – provided by the Americans – capable of carrying out surveillance.

Pakistan’s chief army spokesman said the military had no option but to use helicopter gunships against the school, which he claimed was a front for a militants training camp, because attempts to arrest suspected trainee terrorists believed inside the building could have led to their escape.

“The biggest factor that contributes to success is surprise,” Sultan said. “If we lost the surprise by 10 minutes, the operation (was) likely to fail.”

Sultan said evidence for launching the attack included students aged in their 20s being seen conducting physical exercises outside the school; madrasa leaders telling public rallies that they were preparing suicide bombers, and other intelligence he declined to specify.

Pakistani troops have been preventing journalists, human rights monitors and political leaders from travelling to the site to get a firsthand look at the scene.

New York-based Human Rights Watch urged Pakistan’s government to let independent investigators visit the area to determine who carried out the attack, how it was planned and executed, and who was killed.

“The onus is on the Pakistani government to provide a credible account of the legitimacy of the attack resulting in the deaths of so many,” the group’s South Asia researcher Ali Dayan Hasan said, adding the high number of dead pointed to use of excessive force.

Samina Ahmed, the South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group, said the military should have detained those inside the building, not killed them.

“There was not a fight going on at the time, it wasn’t in the heat of the battle,” Ahmed said. “A more effective tactic would have been law enforcement, do a cordon-and-search, arrest people and try them.”

Sultan, the army spokesman, declined to say if those in the school were armed with guns or not, but said their purported militant training made them dangerous.

“We think the response was justified,” he said.

Among those killed was Liaquat Hussain, a fugitive cleric who ran the targeted religious school. The raid was launched after Hussain, an associate of al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri, rejected government warnings to stop using the school as a terrorist training camp, Sultan said.

Another al-Zawahri lieutenant, Faqir Mohammed, left the madrasa 30 minutes before the strike, according to an intelligence official.

A Pakistani official also claimed that al-Zawahri and al Qaida’s operational commander in eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar province, London terror plot mastermind Abu Ubaida, had previously visited the school, but were not there at the time of the attack.

Musharraf’s government has been under US and Afghan pressure to crack down on militants operating along the Pakistan-Afghan frontier where al Qaida and Taliban militants are believed to roam.