PESHAWAR: Tribal militants have said that the government is showing little urgency in securing the release of some 280 soldiers captured by them in South Waziristan more than a month ago, according to a BBC report.
The report says that BBC was given exclusive access to the militants and the soldiers. The militants are demanding military withdrawal from the area.
“We are very serious about the matter and want to resolve it peacefully,” Zulfiqar Mehsud, a spokesman for militant leader Baitullah Mehsud told the BBC from their base near the border with Afghanistan. He said he believed that the government had several reasons for not being serious, one was the political crisis in Islamabad over the presidential election.
He also said that the government would be trying harder if one of the kidnapped soldiers “was the son or relative of a general or minister”.
The militants, the BBC report said, also brought three of the soldiers to a walled compound to give the first accounts how they had been captured. The soldiers did not want to talk but were pressurised by the militants to do so.
Commanding Officer Col Zafar “told the BBC that pro-Taliban tribesmen had stopped his convoy while he was taking supplies to remote army camps”.
He said his superior officers instructed him to wait while they negotiated with the militant leadership. This took more than four hours. By then the soldiers realised they were surrounded and it was too late to resist. The soldiers said they had been treated well so far.
They were not aware that three of their comrades had already been killed by the militants in a move to put pressure on the government to accede to their demands. They want the release of around 30 jailed militants.
The militants also want the army to pull its troops out of their area, so they can freely cross the border to fight alongside Taliban in Afghanistan.—Courtesy BBC Online
