Second US drone strike kills four militants in NW

MIRANSHAH: A second US missile strike targeting a vehicle travelling in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt near the Afghan border killed four militants on Saturday, officials said.

The attack took place in Inzarkas village, around two kilometres from the scene of an earlier drone strike on Saturday, some 45 kilometres west of Miranshah, the main town in the North Waziristan (NW) tribal district.

“The US drone fired two missiles and targeted a vehicle. Four militants have been killed,” a security official in the area said.

An intelligence official in Miranshah also confirmed the attack and death toll. – AFP

SC takes suo moto notice of torture on lawyers

ISLAMABAD: Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on Saturday took suo moto notice of an incident of Friday which occurred on the premises of District Courts (Aiwan-e-Adl), Lahore, in which reportedly police brutally beat up lawyers.

“The use of excessive force and resorting to high headedness and brutality clearly violate the constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights i.e. right to life, liberty and dignity. Therefore, the matter has been registered under Article 184(3) of the Constitution,” says a press note issued here.

According to reports after the police torture, lawyers were seen throwing stones on police and beating up media personnel on Saturday.

The notices were issued to the Home Secretary, Punjab, Commissioner and DCO Lahore, PPO, Punjab, CPO, Lahore, DIG, Operations and concerned Superintendents of Police, through PPO, to appear in person on Monday and explain the untoward incident in which excessive force was used resulting in injuries to lawyers including female lawyers.

They are also required to explain their position and produce record, if any, showing whether any action has been initiated against police personnel responsible for using excessive force. Notices have also been issued to the Attorney General for Pakistan well as the Advocate General, Punjab to assist the Court.

The TV Channels and media persons have also been asked to provide CDs/DVDs of the incident. It would also be appreciated if they could play the CDs/DVDs in the Court, if required.

The suo moto was taken on reports of electronic and print reports which showed that the police personnel entered the court premises including bar rooms and library and brutally beaten the lawyers resulting in injuries to many, including females. – Agencies

CIA steps up drone campaign in Pakistan: report

WASHINGTON: The US military is secretly diverting aerial drones from Afghanistan to escalate a CIA-led campaign against militants in neighboring Pakistan, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The military has lent Predator and Reaper drones to Central Intelligence Agency operatives to target and bomb militants on the Afghan border, the report said, citing unnamed US officials.

CIA drone strikes in September in Pakistan rose to an average of five per week, up from an average of two or three per week, the Journal said.

Increased strikes in September were partially aimed at disrupting a suspected terror plot against European targets, which was believed to target multiple countries, including Britain, France and Germany.

Unnamed US officials told the paper that a successful terrorist strike against the West coming from Pakistan could result in US forces taking unilateral military action.

According to the Journal, factories cannot produce aerial drones fast enough to satisfy the increased demands of the Pentagon and the CIA.

Pakistani officials have reported that at least 21 US drone attacks have killed around 120 people in September, the highest monthly tally of attacks.

The overwhelming majority of the attacks took place in North Waziristan, considered Pakistan’s most notorious bastion of Al-Qaeda-linked and Taliban commanders opposed to the US-led war in Afghanistan.

Most of the strikes have targeted the Haqqani network, one of the strongest US foes in Afghanistan whose leadership is based in North Waziristan.

But local tribesmen claimed the US missiles were killing civilians.

Washington has classified Pakistan’s tribal belt on the Afghan border as a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.

A covert US drone war in Pakistan has killed around 1,140 people in about 140 strikes since August 2008, including a number of senior militants, but the attacks fuel anti-American sentiment in the conservative Muslim country. —AFP

Joint investigation launched into Nato attack

KARACHI: Officials of the Pakistan Army and Nato forces on Saturday, launched a joint investigation into the border incursions that killed three Pakistani soldiers last week.

The investigations, to be led by officials of the Pakistan army, will also include US army officials, a DawnNews report said.

The probe team will visit Afghanistan to carry out an inquiry and hold talks regarding the attacks, the report added. Stern action will be taken against those involved in the cross border attack.

The three Pakistani troops were killed in an early morning raid on Thursday when Nato choppers fired at a Pakistani military post 200 metres inside the border in Kurram Agency.

This was the fourth aerial violation in less than a week, but the first in which soldiers were killed. Reacting to the incident, Pakistan partially shut down a Nato supply route and lodged a protest with the Nato command in Brussels, demanding an apology.

Drone attack kills six militants in North Waziristan

MIRANSHAH: A US drone strike killed six militants on Saturday in the North Waziristan tribal region, local security officials said.

Four missiles hit a house used by militants in Dashgah village near Datta Khel town, some 45 kilometers west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan tribal district, the officials said.

“Two US drones fired four missiles and destroyed the house. Six militants were killed in this attack,” a Pakistani security official based in Peshawar told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Two intelligence officials in Miranshah also confirmed the attack and the death toll.

“All of them were militants attached to the Haqqani group,” one intelligence official said.

The second intelligence official told AFP that initial reports suggested the dead were Uzbek militants from Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials have reported that at least 21 US drone attacks have killed around 120 people in September, the highest monthly tally of attacks.

The overwhelming majority of the attacks have been carried out in North Waziristan, considered a bastion of Al-Qaeda-linked and Taliban commanders opposed to the US-led war in Afghanistan.

Most of the strikes have targeted the Haqqani network, one of the strongest US foes in Afghanistan whose leadership is based in North Waziristan.

Nato claims insurgent captures; three soldiers killed

KABUL: Nato said Friday it captured several insurgent leaders in recent days and detained at least 438 suspected militants over the last month, as three coalition soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan.

Afghan and coalition forces also killed at least 15 insurgents in a firefight in eastern Kunar province who were trying to set up an attack position, the coalition said. It said initial reports indicated there were no injuries to civilians.

Nato said Afghan and international forces captured a senior Taliban leader based in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province Thursday. A military operation called ‘‘Dragon Strike’’ is under way in Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban insurgency, to clear the area of militants.

The captured Taliban leader helped militants obtain weapons and bomb components and provided training and bed-down locations for the Taliban leadership, Nato said. It said the security force did not fire its weapons in taking the leader into custody.

Nato also said that Afghan and coalition security forces captured a Haqqani Network operative involved in explosive attacks and providing support to Taliban insurgents. He was captured in Khost, in the east near Pakistan, on Thursday.

The Haqqani Network is based in Pakistan and is believed to have links to Al-Qaeda.

Nato said in a statement that the suspect was detained along with three of his associates. The security force found an automatic weapon, ammunition and a hand grenade at the scene, it said.

Also in Khost, another Haqqani senior leader and six insurgents were killed in an operation Thursday, Nato said. It said the leader was directly involved in the planning and coordination of attacks against forward operating bases Salerno and Chapman in August in which more than 30 Haqqani Network insurgents were killed.

In a separate statement Friday, Nato said more than 438 suspected insurgents were detained in September and 114 insurgents were killed.

Nato said security forces last month captured or killed more than 105 Haqqani Network and Taliban leaders, including shadow governors, leaders, sub-leaders and weapons facilitators. It said Afghan and coalition forces completed 194 missions, 88 percent of them without shots fired.

Among the killed was Abdallah Umar al-Qurayshi, an Al-Qaeda senior leader who coordinated the attacks of a group of Arab fighters in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, Nato said. He was killed in an air strike in Kunar, near Pakistan, on Saturday, along with Abu Atta al Kuwaiti, an Al-Qaeda explosive expert, and several Arab foreign fighters, it said.

Just north of Kandahar, two Romanian soldiers were killed and one was injured Friday when their Humvee was struck by a roadside bomb about 25 miles northeast of Qalat in Zabul province, according to Romania’s defense ministry. Romania has about 1,660 troops in Afghanistan — mostly in the restive south. It has lost 17 service members in the conflict there, including Friday’s casualties.

Nato also reported two deaths Friday in eastern Afghanistan, and the death of another service member from a non-battle injury in southern Afghanistan. No details of the deaths or the nationalities of the service members were disclosed.

This year has already become the deadliest of the nine-year war for the coalition. —AP

Obama apologizes for US sex-disease study

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama personally apologized Friday to his Guatemalan counterpart for a US-led study conducted in the 1940s, in which hundreds of people in the Latin American state were deliberately infected with sexually-transmitted diseases.

In a phone conversation with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom, Obama expressed his deep regret for the experiment conducted by US public health researchers in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948, and apologized “to all those affected.”

The US president also vowed that all human medical studies conducted today will be held to exacting US and international legal and ethical standards.

“This is shocking, it’s tragic, it’s reprehensible,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters, adding to apologies and outrage voiced by the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other US officials.

In an impromptu news conference in Guatemala Friday, Colom denounced the study as “a crime against humanity”, and said he had learned of the gruesome years-long experiment in the phone call from Clinton.

Clinton had phoned Colom Thursday to express her personal outrage and deep regret over the “reprehensible research.”

“What happened all those years ago is a crime against humanity and the government reserves the right to lodge a formal legal complaint over it,” Colom said.

But almost immediately, he backed off his tough talk, saying: “We are aware that this is not the policy of the United States... this happened so long ago.”

Clinton and Sebelius said in a joint statement Friday that the study was “clearly unethical” and apologized to all those who had been affected by it.

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US government body that funded the study, called it “deeply disturbing” and “an appalling example in a dark chapter in the history of medicine.”

Senator Robert Menendez, a member of the congressional Hispanic caucus, called the experiments in Guatemala one of the “darkest moments” in US history.

“No innocent fellow human should be treated as a lab rat, no matter your nationality,” Menendez said.

The study, which was never published, came to light this year after Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby stumbled upon archived documents outlining the 1940s experiment led by controversial US public health doctor John Cutler.

Cutler and his fellow researchers enrolled people in Guatemala, including mental patients, for the study, which aimed to find out if penicillin, relatively new in the 1940s, could be used to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.

“There is no evidence study participants gave informed consent, and in fact the subjects were often deceived about what was being done to them,” Collins told reporters as he outlined the experiment’s most flagrant ethics violations.

The US doctor behind the Guatemala study, Cutler, was also involved in a highly controversial study known as the Tuskegee Experiment in which hundreds of African American men with late-stage syphilis were observed given no remedial treatment for 40 years, between 1932 and 1972.

Initially, the researchers infected female commercial sex workers with gonorrhea or syphilis, and then allowed them to have unprotected sex with soldiers or prison inmates.

“When few of these men became infected, the research approach changed to direct inoculation of soldiers, prisoners and mental hospital patients,” background documents on the study show.

A total of some 1,500 people took part in the study. At least one patient died during the experiments, although it is not clear whether the death was from the tests or from an underlying medical problem.

The US surgeon general in the 1940s, Thomas Parran, appeared to have been aware of the experiment, as were “components” of the Guatemalan government at the time, said Collins.

The Pan American Health Organization, whose predecessor, the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, received grant money from the NIH for the study, expressed its “deep regrets for past ethics violations” and vowed to cooperate with investigators as they dig out specifics of the study.

Independent experts under the umbrella of the US Institute of Medicine will conduct a fact-finding probe of the Guatemala study, and the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues will convene international experts to review standards surrounding human medical research, Collins said. —AFP

Bin Laden role eyed in latest European terror plot

WASHINGTON: Osama bin Laden and top Al-Qaeda leadership are likely behind the latest European terror plot, US officials said on Friday.

The plot, revealed earlier this week, appeared to be in its early stages. It aimed to launch coordinated attacks in European capitals, with gunmen opening fire in Britain, Germany, France and possibly elsewhere.

European security sources have drawn comparisons to the brazen Mumbai attacks in 2008, which targeted city landmarks including luxury hotels and a cafe and killed around 170 people.

One US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the origin of the plot in Pakistan’s tribal areas suggested the involvement of bin Laden and senior Al-Qaeda leaders, since that is where they are believed to be hiding.

The United States has stepped up targeted strikes on insurgents in Pakistan using unmanned drone aircraft, aiming to disrupt Al-Qaeda and its allies from plotting attacks.

US intelligence officials have stressed this week that Al-Qaeda, responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, has been clear in its intentions to strike the United States and Europe.

Indian security officials have linked the 10 Mumbai assailants, who used automatic weaopns and hand grenades, to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group with close ties to Al-Qaeda. —Reuters

Musharraf apologises for mistakes, launches party

LONDON: Former president Pervez Musharraf launched his ‘All Pakistan Muslim League’ party here on Friday and apologised for the mistakes he said he had committed towards the end of his nine-year rule.

“I am aware of the fact that there were some decisions which I took which resulted in negative political repercussions, which had adverse effects on nation-building and national political events, and my popularity also, may I say, plummeted in that last year. I take this opportunity to sincerely apologise to the whole nation. Human beings make mistakes,” Gen (retd) Musharraf told scores of cheering supporters.

But he vowed to galvanise people and fight a “jihad against poverty, hunger, illiteracy and backwardness”.

The programme, attended by a number of politicians who were in his government, was compered by Advocate Naim Bukhari who had fired the first shot at the chief justice of the Supreme Court, a few days before Mr Musharraf launched his attack on the judiciary which marked the beginning of the end of his rule.

The retired general unveiled the new political party and its manifesto at a gentlemen’s club in Whitehall Palace. Tight security arrangements were made with all those entering the room being thoroughly checked.

Mr Musharraf attacked the “total despondency and demoralisation and hopelessness which prevails in society today” and said: “The time has come to redeem our pledge... to ensure the fruits of freedom are shared by all. The time has come for a new social contract to keep the dream of our forefathers alive... to make Pakistan into a progressive Islamic state for others in the Third World to emulate.”

He said the new party would be a ‘national salvation’ that would “galvanise all Pakistanis regardless of religion, caste or creed” and warned the country’s current government was failing to “show any signs of light in the darkness that prevails in Pakistan”.

He said under his government there would be progress in every field. “I have confidence I can lead Pakistan towards light.”

He said: “New social system will consist of three documents. Whatever we will do first of all it will be in conformity with Quran and Sunnah. Second will be realisation of dream of Quaid-i-Azam and third will be Objectives Resolution.”

Mr Musharraf said he would contest the next elections in 2013, although he announced he would return to Pakistan before then.

Answering a question, he said: “Whatever the dangers, whatever the pitfalls, I will be in Pakistan before the next election.”

The 67-year-old acknowledged threats from militants, but brushed off the threat of treason charges he could face on his return.

“Today there is no case against me in the courts of Pakistan. Whatever cases have been instituted have been done on political grounds. That I am prepared to face when I get there,” he said.

Mr Musharraf made the announcement against a backdrop comprising the white and green colours of Pakistan’s flag and his APML’s logo, the crescent and star of the national flag and a hawk’s head.

He cited Iqbal’s verses to explain the significance of the symbol of hawk (Shaheen) that he has selected for his party.

He declared that he had the experience to tackle the challenges of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the spread of extremism in Pakistan. He insisted that unless Pakistan was part of the fight against terrorism and extremism, “that fight will not succeed.”

He said he would not do anything different this time around, saying his regime made strides to stamp out terror threats and that a crucial part of his strategy would be improving the economy.

“There will be zero tolerance for extremism,” he said. He said he was launching the party in London because he risked assassination if he returned to Pakistan. He will spread his message at a rally in Birmingham on Saturday.

His speech and comments later made at a press conference were greeted by criticism from leaders of mainstream political parties who appeared on Pakistan TV channels and declared that the ‘ousted dictator’ had no future in politics.

PULLOUT ASSAILED
In a BBC interview on Friday, Mr Musharraf said the militants could be defeated, but warned West’s plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan would be counter-productive as it would “boost” home-grown extremism that was inspired by the Taliban.

“I think they can be defeated, but if I have any doubts on whether we can win, I would say it’s been a failure of leadership in the United States and Europe... and a failure of leadership in Pakistan,” he told BBC.

“Nobody is telling the people who are demanding their soldiers to come back that this will be their worst decision, it will be a blunder. People here or in the United States think you are fighting somebody else’s war.”

Criticising the Pakistani government, he said: “When there is a dysfunctional government and the nation is going down, its economy is going down, there is a clamour, there is a pressure on the military by the people.”

It is unclear how much support Mr Musharraf still has within the military. Many of his close allies in the army and in the intelligence services have since retired.

“He doesn’t have the same kind of clout he did,” Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan’s High Commissioner to Britain said. “He’s yesterday’s man.”--Agencies