PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The bodies of 15 members of Pakistan's
paramilitary Frontier Constabulary (FC) were found Thursday, almost two
weeks after they were kidnapped from a northwestern town, officials
said.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the killings.
"We
have received dead bodies of 15 kidnapped FC men", senior local FC
commander Ali Sher Mehsud told AFP, revising the earlier death toll.
He said that the FC men were killed in Shawa," a small town in the North Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border.
All the corpses, which arrived in a military hospital in the northwestern Tal town, had bullet wounds, he added.
A local intelligence official also confirmed the killings.
The FC personnel were kidnapped late last month during a night-time attack on a checkpoint in the northwestern town of Tank.
Pakistan's
seven tribal districts near the Afghan border, including North
Waziristan, are rife with homegrown insurgents and are strongholds of
Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives.
Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah
Ehsan claimed responsibility for the killings, telling AFP: "We have
taken revenge for continued operations of security forces against us.
They are in fact fighting for Americans."
Islamist militants
opposed to the government, particularly the nebulous Tehreek-e-Taliban
(TTP) network, have carried out bomb and gun attacks killing more than
4,700 people across Pakistan since July 2007.
But significantly,
there has been no major Islamist militant attack in Pakistan since a
suicide bomber killed 46 people, targeting an anti-Taliban militia at a
funeral in the northwestern district of Lower Dir on September 15 last
year.
Pakistan has for years battled insurgents in the northwest
and the tribal belt. More than 3,000 soldiers have died but Islamabad
has resisted US pressure.
The United States described Pakistani
tribal regions as the most dangerous place on earth and asked Islamabad
to take decisive action against militants especially in North
Waziristan, a bastion of the Haqqani network.
But Pakistan
withstood US pressure to wage battle with the Afghan Taliban-allied
Haqqani network, which is blamed for some of the worst attacks in
Afghanistan.
Pakistan's fragile alliance with the United States
crashed to new lows on November 26, when NATO air strikes killed 24
Pakistani soldiers in what the Pakistan military called a deliberate
attack.
The air strikes were the latest in a series of crises last
year that have brought the fragile Pakistani-US alliance to an all-time
low.
In January, a CIA contractor shot dead two Pakistanis and
was taken into custody, accused of double murder. On May 2, a covert
American raid killed Osama bin Laden near the capital without Washington
informing the government.
Pakistan refused to take part in the
inquiry, having criticised previous investigations into cross-border
attacks as worthless. Instead, it has sought a formal apology from US
President Barack Obama.
Islamabad has kept its Afghan border
closed to NATO convoys since November 26, boycotted the Bonn conference
on Afghanistan and ordered Americans to leave an air base understood to
have been a hub for CIA drone strikes on the Taliban. AFP
