Peshawar, Pakistan — A suicide bomber blew him himself up on Sunday at a central police station in the largest town in the Swat valley, killing 15 police recruits and shattering the semblance of normality that the army has tried to enforce in the troubled area.
A group of new police officers, recently hired to patrol local communities, were performing training exercises when the suicide bomber struck at the police station in Mingora, the information minister for the North West Frontier Province, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said.
The attack came as the Pakistani Army has asserted that it now controls most of the Swat valley and that the Taliban militants who held sway there for nearly two years had been beaten back to only a few enclaves.
The bomber disguised himself as a police recruit and walked into the compound, which is surrounded by high walls, officials said.
The police station had been hit so many times by the Taliban in the previous two years that the regular police of Mingora had abandoned the compound and handed it over for training exercises, local officials said.
The medical superintendant of the main hospital in Mingora, Lal Noor Afridi, said 13 policemen had died at the police and two more had died at the hospital.. There were reports of injuries to about 20 other recruits.
Muhammed Qasim, 28, a university student, said he had been preparing to drive to Peshawar when the bomb went off. “I was standing outside and heard a huge blast, followed by firing,” Mr. Qasim said. Soldiers fired their weapons to signal that the military was imposing an immediate curfew on the town, he said.
The brazen nature of the attack right in the center of Mingora showed the high cost of the failure of the army to capture or kill top Taliban commanders and strategists. The attack, the fourth by militants against security forces in the last month, was by far the most devastating.
Making community police recruits the target of the attack appeared to be a carefully considered strategic choice, striking at one of the main elements of the government’s plan to provide improved security against the militants.
The new police officers were vetted and hired last month under a program introduced by the provincial government to provide local law enforcement officers who could identify militants and protect the public.
The new community officers are paid the equivalent of $120 a month, a larger salary than regular police officers receive. But the new positions do not include a pension or other benefits.
The killing of so many recruits at the beginning of the program will discourage good candidates in the future, said Sher Mohammed, a lawyer from Mingora.
The attack may also have been retaliation against the military for what local residents and human rights advocates say have been extrajudicial killings of suspected militants by the military.
The Pakistani Army has denied that soldiers have arrested suspected militants, killed them and left their bodies in the streets.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan earlier this month called the accusations credible and said that it had gathered “complaints of reprisal attacks by the security forces during the operation in Swat.”link....
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