Gunmen who took up to 250 Pakistani school children hostage in a
northwestern town yesterday freed them all and surrendered to
tribal elders, a government spokesman said.
"All the children have been released and the criminals have
surrendered to the jirga," said interior ministry spokesman Javel
Iqbal Cheema. A jirga is a council of tribal elders. Cheema said
none of the children were hurt.
Violence has spread across Pakistan in recent months, seeping
out of remote tribal regions that are sanctuaries for Al Qaida and
Taliban militants and into cities and towns, raising fears about
the stability of the nuclear-armed US ally.
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Cheema said the gunmen were members of a kidnap gang but government
officials and police had earlier said there were about seven
Islamist militants holding the children in the school in Bannu
town.
President Pervez Musharraf told a news conference in London the
gunmen were "extremists".
The gunmen fled into the school in the town in North West
Frontier Province and took the children hostage after they had
kidnapped a health department official and his driver, police
said.
Police chased the gunman and one militant was killed in a clash
before the rest of them fled into the school, police said. The
health official and his driver were freed.
Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz had said there were between 200
and 250 children in the school.
Separately, more than 150 militants and 20 soldiers have been
killed in the South Waziristan fighting this month.
Militant violence has surged since July, when the security
forces stormed a radical Islamabad mosque where militants defying
the government had amassed a large quantity of weapons.
Hundreds of people have been killed in a wave of attacks,
including many suicide bombings, since then.
The US, which is leading the battle against Taliban militants in
neighboring Afghanistan, is concerned about increasing Al Qaida and
Taliban efforts to destabilize Pakistan.
(China Daily via Agencies January 29, 2008)
