Washed It!

U.S. and British officials are investigating whether a British aid worker kidnapped by Taliban militants in Afghanistan may have been inadvertently killed by American troops as they attempted to rescue her last week.

British officials initially announced that Linda Norgrove, 36, had been killed by her Islamist captors Friday during a rescue attempt carried out by U.S. special forces. Norgrove was kidnapped along with three Afghan colleagues two weeks ago in eastern Kunar province while visiting a development project there. Militants had earlier freed Norgrove’s Afghan co-workers.

On Monday, the U.S. military said in a prepared statement that a review of surveillance footage and interviews with members of the rescue team “do not conclusively determine the cause of her death.” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, ordered an investigation into Norgrove’s death, the statement said.

In London, British Prime Minister David Cameron said at a news conference that Petraeus had told him Norgrove may have been killed by a grenade thrown by a member of the U.S. rescue team. Cameron said his foreign secretary, William Hague, had given the go-ahead to launch the rescue effort after deciding that Norgrove was at grave risk. Cameron said Hague’s decision had his support.

“We were clear that Linda’s life was in grave danger and the operation offered the best chance of saving her life,” Cameron told reporters. “I will obviously go over in my mind 100 times whether it was the right decision, but I profoundly believe it was.”

A former United Nations worker, Norgrove was working on a $150-million project for the U.S. aid group Development Alternatives Inc., aimed at strengthening local economies in Afghanistan.

The decision to forge ahead with a rescue mission was made after North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies received a tip about Norgrove’s whereabouts. Six militants holding Norgrove were also killed in the rescue bid.

alex.rodriguez@latimes.com

U.S. troops may have killed kidnapped British aid worker during failed rescue attempt

Pakistan on Sunday reopened a key Afghan border crossing used by trucks and tankers ferrying fuel and supplies to NATO troops in Afghanistan, ending an 11-day blockade imposed after a NATO helicopter cross-border incursion that killed two Pakistani troops.

The first of hundreds of trucks and tankers stranded at the Torkham checkpoint at the Khyber Pass since Sept. 30 began moving across the border early afternoon Sunday. The border reopening should ease the massive bottleneck created by the blockade, which was followed by a series of militant attacks on parked NATO oil tankers and trucks across Pakistan.

More than 150 NATO trucks were set ablaze or damaged in those attacks. At least six people were killed in the attacks.

Although U.S. officials hailed the border reopening as a welcome development, relations between Islamabad and Washington remained palpably tense. The killing of the two Pakistani border soldiers by NATO helicopters on Sept. 30 was seen in Pakistan as an intolerable violation of the country’s sovereignty and came at a time when the U.S. had dramatically stepped up its drone-missile campaign against Taliban and Al Qaeda militants hiding out in Pakistan’s largely lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border.

In September, the U.S. carried out 22 drone-missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas, most of them directed at the Afghan Taliban wing known as the Haqqani network in the North Waziristan region. Pakistan has balked at moving against Haqqani network fighters, a reluctance that has exasperated officials in Washington because Haqqani fighters use North Waziristan as a base for launching attacks on U.S., NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials decided on Saturday that they would reopen the Torkham crossing. That decision came four days after the U.S. government and NATO formally apologized for the deaths of the Pakistani soldiers, saying the helicopter crews mistook the men for insurgents they had been pursuing across the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Pakistan plays a vital role in keeping supply lines open for U.S. and Western troops battling Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. About 40% of NATO’s non-lethal supplies bound for Afghanistan move by truck from the Pakistani port city of Karachi to either the northwestern border crossing at Torkham or the southern crossing at Chaman. The Chaman crossing, located in Balochistan province, was not shut down after the Sept. 30 NATO helicopter incursion.

In recent years, U.S and NATO forces have established northern routes through former Soviet republics in Central Asia as alternate supply lines, which has allowed NATO to reduce its reliance on Pakistan as a transit nation. At one point, 80% of NATO’s non-lethal supplies moved through Pakistan.

alex.rodriguez@latimes.com
Pakistan reopens border crossing to NATO trucks

PARACHINAR, Pakistan (Reuters) – NATO helicopters from Afghanistan attacked a militant-infested border region of Pakistan on Thursday, killing three Pakistani soldiers, a Pakistani official said, a raid that is certain to raise tensions.

A spokeswoman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, however, said none of its helicopters had crossed into Pakistani airspace.

Pakistan has said it would consider “response options” if NATO forces continued to violate its sovereignty.

On Thursaday, two NATO helicopters attacked Teri Mangal village in Kurram, an ethnic Pashtun tribal region in the Pakistani northwest, a Pakistani security official said.

“The helicopters shelled the area for about 25 minutes. Three of our soldiers manning a border post were killed and three wounded,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

Thursday’s attack if confirmed, would be the fourth cross-border raid in recent days, which comes just as the United States steps up strikes by unmanned drone aircraft in Pakistan’s North Waziristan.

ISAF spokeswoman Major Sunset Belinsky said the helicopters targeted militants in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktia province, opposite Kurram, and they did not cross into Pakistan.

But Pakistan military officials had informed ISAF that their border forces had been struck in the attack, she said in a statement.

“ISAF is working with Pakistan to ascertain if the two events are linked. The matter remains under investigation,” she said.

A Pakistani security official said authorities had stopped trucks carrying supplies for the NATO forces in Afghanistan at a checkpost in neighbouring Khyber region after the incident.

“Yes, the NATO supplies have been stopped. It has been done locally,” he told Reuters.

The rugged border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is seen by Washington as a critical battleground in its fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Though many analysts believe that the strikes by unmanned U.S. drones are carried out with the tacit approval of Pakistan, any border incursions by foreign troops is a highly explosive issue in Pakistan where anti-American sentiments run very high.

In 2008, Pakistani troops had fired on US military helicopters and forced them to return to Afghanistan after Pakistan army chief General Ashfaque Kayani said Pakistan would not allow foreign troops on its soil.

The latest series of raids began last Friday when two NATO Apache helicopters killed 30 insurgents on Pakistani soil after a rare manned pursuit across the border from eastern Afghanistan. It followed an attack by militants on a remote Afghan security outpost in Khost province, NATO said.

On Saturday, two Kiowa helicopters returned to the area and killed another four. Monday saw another possible border violation, with six militants killed in Kurram, a Reuters reporter in the area said. But an ISAF spokesman said it was “near the border,” rather than in Pakistan.

ISAF said in a statement issued late on Sunday that helicopters crossing into Pakistan were following its rules of engagement.
Pakistan says 3 soldiers killed in NATO strike

A Taliban suicide bomber detonated a car in an alley behind a police station in a strategically important town in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, killing at least 17 police and civilians in an explosion that shattered the station and neighboring homes.

About 40 people were wounded in the attack in Lakki Marwat, which sits on the main road between Punjab province, Pakistan’s largest and most prosperous, and the North and South Waziristan tribal regions. A Pakistani army offensive pushed many militants out of South Waziristan in October. The militants still control much of North Waziristan, where U.S. drone aircraft have been conducting a campaign of targeted killings.

Rescue workers and police officials were digging through rubble at the station in the town of Lakki Marwat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, police official Ghulam Mohammad Khan said. Nine police officers, four adult civilians and four children going to school were slain in the attack.

Police official Liaquat Ali said 45 police were in the building when the bomber struck.

“I said my morning prayers and we went to sleep, then suddenly there was a big bang. All the debris fell on us,” police official Ikramullah Khan told The Associated Press from a bed in a nearby hospital, where many of the wounded lay wailing in pain as relatives comforted each other.

Emergency workers and local residents used cranes to move the rubble of the mostly destroyed police station. Books and a schoolbag could be seen in the wreckage and the twisted frames of a motorcycle and a car sat nearby. A neighborhood shop and mosque also were partly destroyed.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying they targeted the police for encouraging residents to set up militias to fight the militants — known locally as lashkars. The group pledged to carry out additional attacks unless the militias disbanded.

“After the police, we will attack those active in forming anti-Taliban lashkars if they have not given up their activities,” Taliban spokesman Ahsanullah Ahsan told The Associated Press by telephone from an undisclosed location.

The police chief of Lakki Marwat district was killed in a suicide bombing several months ago and militants have carried out a string of attacks in the area since then.

In recent days, militants have launched attacks across the nation aimed at destabilizing the country and weakening a civilian government already struggling with a massive flooding that has displaced millions and caused widespread destruction.

The deadliest have targeted minority Shiite Muslims. A suicide bombing killed at least 43 Shiite Muslims at a procession in the southwestern city of Quetta on Friday. Two days earlier, a triple suicide attack killed 35 people at a Shiite ceremony in the eastern city of Lahore.

Both were claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, whose commander Qari Hussain Mehsud threatened Friday that his group would wage imminent attacks in the U.S. and Europe.

On the same day, Pakistani intelligence officials said two suspected U.S. missile strikes had killed at least seven people in North Waziristan, which is largely controlled by the Haqqani network, one of the main groups battling Americans in neighboring Afghanistan.
Taliban suicide bomber kills 17 in Pakistan

Three bomb blasts killed 34 people Monday in northwest Pakistan, authorities said. Though no one claimed responsibility for the attacks, they came at a time when government officials have been warning that Islamic militants might try to exploit the strain that this summer’s catastrophic floods have put on the country’s military and government by unleashing a new wave of violence.

One of the attacks occurred in South Waziristan, a tribal area along the Afghan border long regarded as a stronghold for the Pakistani Taliban. A teenage suicide bomber appeared at a mosque in the town of Wana where 200 worshippers were praying and detonated explosives strapped to his body, witnesses said. The blast killed 25 people and injured 36 others, hospital officials said.

Among the dead was Maulana Noor Muhammad, a former lawmaker and head of the Islamic school where the mosque was located. He had just finished translating verses from the Koran when the blast occurred. Muhammad was a member of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Fazlur Rehman) party, which historically has been sympathetic to the Taliban movement.

“I saw a teenager who shook hands with Maulana Noor Muhammad before detonating the explosives,” said Ayub Wazir, a worshipper who survived the blast.

The motive of the attack was unclear. At times, violence in the tribal areas occurs between rival tribal and militant factions.

A second attack occurred in the Kurram tribal district when a remote-controlled bomb exploded in a school where tribal elders had been meeting. The blast, which occurred in the village of Parachamkani, killed six people and injured seven others, authorities said.

The third attack occurred early in the evening on the outskirts of northwest Pakistan’s largest city, Peshawar. A bomb planted in a push cart exploded in the town of Mattani, killing three people and injuring six others, police said. Dilawar Khan, head of a local anti-Taliban militia, said his militia was the target of the attack. Two of the dead belonged to the militia.

In both South Waziristan and Kurram, Pakistani troops have launched offensives over the last year to flush out Taliban militants and reestablish governmental control over the regions. Despite the offensives, pockets of militants remain active in many parts of the tribal areas.

Last week, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister for northwest Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, warned that militants had been regrouping in the tribal areas to take advantage of a time when the state has had to deploy thousands of Pakistani soldiers and police to cope with the ongoing flood crisis, which has killed more than 1,600 people and submerged vast swathes of the country.

In the tribal district of North Waziristan, two U.S. drone missile strikes killed 12 people and injured 15 others, intelligence sources said.

One of the missiles targeted Dandy Darpakhel, an area known as a stronghold of the Haqqani network, a wing of the Afghan Taliban. Among the seven killed were four women, the sources said. The other strike killed five people in the village of Derga Mandai, sources said.

alex.rodriguez@latimes.com

Special correspondent Ali reported from Peshawar and staff writer Rodriguez from Islamabad.
34 killed in Pakistan; bombings occur in Taliban stronghold areas

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday that the floods ravaging Pakistan are the worst disaster he has witnessed, and urged the international community to speed up delivery of food, medicine and shelter to millions of people — many of whom have yet to receive anything.

The Pakistani government and international relief organizations have been overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, which has killed more than 1,600 people and damaged or destroyed more than 722,000 houses from the country’s mountainous northwest to its central agricultural heartland and the flatlands of Sindh province in the south.