11 men kidnapped were executed in Pak, militants claim
SWAT (Pakistan) (AP): Authorities recovered the beheaded bodies of four Pakistani security forces on Saturday after militant supporters of a hard-line cleric publicly executed them, officials said.
A spokesman for the cleric, Maulana Fazlullah, said seven other people kidnapped Friday from the same minibus had also been killed, but there was no immediate confirmation from officials.
``It was done by common people, who support us because we only want enforcement of Islamic laws,'' the spokesman, Sirajuddin, who goes by one name, told The Associated Press.
Militants carried out the kidnappings on the outskirts of Swat district in an apparent response to an attack Friday by security forces on Fazlullah's stronghold of Imam Dheri village in which troops backed by helicopters and militants traded fire using rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and other weapons.
The fighting claimed at least three lives. It had subsided Saturday.
About 2,500 paramilitary troops have been deployed to Swat _ until recently regarded as one of Pakistan's main tourist resorts because of its mountain and river scenery _ to tackle the cleric who has rallied his supporters to wage jihad, or holy war, against government forces.
Rising militancy in northwestern Pakistan has shaken the authority of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key ally in the U.S. war on terror. The latest violence marks an escalation of the conflict between his government and pro-Taliban forces.
Authorities on Saturday dropped leaflets from a helicopter urging residents to help police and paramilitary forces ``eliminate extremism and terrorism from the Swat valley.''
``You must remember that establishing Islamic courts, implementation of Shariah (Islamic law) and bringing peace is the first priority of the government,'' it said in the local Pashtu language.
Police recovered the remains of four of the kidnapped men _ three Frontier Constabulary soldiers and one policeman _ before dawn on Saturday, said Javed Shah, a local police official. He said villagers told police the executions were conducted Friday in public in Ningulai village, about three kilometers (two miles) from Imam Dheri.
Another local security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety, said militants paraded the severed heads in the bazaar of the nearby town of Matta.
``The masked militants, who were Maulana Fazlullah men, displayed their heads and threw the severed heads and the remains of the three FC people and one policeman in a farm field,'' Shah said.
He said the fate of the remaining seven people, including three civilians, was still not known.
Officials had initially reported that the three civilians in the minibus were freed, but Shah said no one had seen them.
The fighting and executions followed a suicide car bombing Thursday that hit a truck carrying paramilitary troops in a crowded area of Mingora, the main town in Swat district. The attack killed 19 soldiers and a civilian and wounded 35.
Sirajuddin denied the cleric's involvement in the bombing, saying he wanted peace in the region and only wanted to impose Islamic law. The spokesman vowed that militants would fight to the death against security forces attacking them.
Militants armed with AK-47 assault rifles and submachine guns manned checkpoints on the road leading to Imam Dheri and checked every vehicle. Other long-haired and bearded fighters, wearing turbans and covering their faces, stood at the roadside.
Fazlullah leads a banned pro-Taliban group that sent thousands of volunteers to fight in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. The group has re-emerged this year in Swat and Malakand, another impoverished conservative region near the Afghan border.
The Mingora blast came a week after an assassination attempt on ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in the southern city of Karachi that killed 143 people. Bhutto traveled to her hometown of Larkana on Saturday, her first trip outside Karachi since her return last week from overseas exile.
No one has claimed responsibility for that attack.
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