May 5, 2005	Thursday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 25, 1426

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PESHAWAR/Timergara, May 4: The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will invite families from the districts of upper and lower Dir to Islamabad for information about their missing relatives who might have been killed when Afghanistan’s northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the US-backed Northern Alliance in November 2001.

The relatives of the hundreds of missing militants will take part in the process at the ICRC office in Islamabad in four to five weeks.

They will be required to identify their missing relatives from photographs to be shown to them, said Islamabad-based ICRC Communication Coordinator Layla Berlemont.

The official told Dawn on telephone from Islamabad that the ICRC had been in contact with hundreds of people whose relative had gone missing in Afghanistan.

Sources said that the families had approached the ICRC for information about their relatives who might have been killed in a fierce gun-battle with forces of the Northern Alliance.

About 200 Pakistanis were killed after the forces encircled around 1,200 Pakistani combatants in the Razia Sultana High School in Mazar-i-Sharif in November 2001.

Those who managed to escape from the school building were caught and imprisoned by warlords.

The Northern Alliance forces were reported to have stormed the compound when armed Pakistani volunteers refused to lay down arms.

Chief of the disbanded Tehrik Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Muhammadi Maulana Sufi Mohammad had sent ‘hundreds of thousands’ of armed volunteers from the NWFP and Federally Administered Tribal Areas to Afghanistan to fight along with the Taliban against the US-led coalition forces.

Giving an eyewitness account of the attack on the school building Haji Mohammad Haneef, who had managed to escape, told Dawn that about 2,000 Pakistanis were in the compound when it came under air attack and shelling by tanks.

Haji Haneef, 55, who belongs to the Shamshi Khan area of Lower Dir, said: “Initially, the volunteers agreed to surrender. But while we were disarming, they started killing us, which resulted in a fierce gun-battle”. “The fighting left more than 700 volunteers dead,” he said.

A large number of Pakistanis who were captured in Afghanistan have been released from several government and private detention centres, while the whereabouts of hundreds of others are still unknown.

The sources said that ICRC workers had obtained from the building pictures and other evidences relating to the victims which would be shown to the relatives to establish the victims’ identity. It will be a confidential process and the ICRC is handling the matter with a lot of caution.

“Certainly, we are handling a very difficult issue because hundreds of families are involved,” the communication coordinator of the ICRC said.

District Coordination Officer, Lower Dir, Syed Mohammad Javed confirmed that the committee was in contact with the families in the area but said that the authorities were not involved in the process.