Hundreds of mourners attended funerals yesterday for more than 30 anti-Taliban tribesmen killed in a brazen suicide attack in northwestern Pakistan.
More than 100 people were also wounded on Friday when a militant detonated his explosive-laden vehicle near a crowd of about 500 tribesmen, gathered at Ghaljo village to discuss how to evict insurgents from the area, government official Rehman Khan said.
Officials said earlier 22 people were killed in the attack, but Khan said the death toll rose yesterday after some of the wounded died in hospitals.
Media reports said as many as 50 people were killed.
“According to my information, more than 30 people died in the attack and their funerals were held today,” Khan said, adding residents and elders planned to meet again yesterday to discuss the situation.
Tribal elder Hazrat Noor said the fight against militants would continue.
“We are sad over yesterday’s attack, but God willing we will defeat these terrorists,” he said.
In the nearby Bajur tribal region, where a military offensive against insurgents has raged for two months, four more beheaded bodies of anti-Taliban tribal elders were found yesterday.
That brought to eight the number of beheaded bodies found in two days, government official Jamil Khan said.
All eight were part of a tribal council in the Charmang area that wanted to establish a militia to battle insurgents, he said.
Khan said local tribesman had taken revenge by attacking suspected militant houses.
After the Orakzai attack, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari vowed to “wipe out the menace of terrorism and extremism from the society,” the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan news agency said.
But in recent weeks, the US has signaled its impatience with Pakistani efforts by apparently stepping up cross-border assaults on alleged militant targets.
The US is suspected in at least 11 missile strikes on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border since mid-August, killing more than 100 people, most of them alleged militants, according to an Associated Press count based on figures provided by Pakistani intelligence officials.
The US rarely confirms or denies the attacks.
Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders have criticized the strikes as violations of their country’s sovereignty.
“We want them [the United States] to realize that these attacks are destabilizing the situation, and they are not helping them or Pakistan,” Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Sadiq said.
“They are helping the terrorists,” he said.
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