Seven minors were among 22 people injured in an alleged quadcopter strike in the Wana tehsil of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s South Waziristan district, according to a hospital list.
An incident report issued by the district headquarters hospital (DHQ) in Wana mentioned a “drone attack” at 8pm, which injured 22 people aged between 13 and 60 years.
The condition of a 13-year-old and a man was listed as “serious”, and they were referred to “tertiary care”. Seven, including three aged 15, 18 and 19 years, had “major” injuries. The rest of the 13 had “minor” injuries, of which two were discharged.
PTI-affiliated MNA Zubair Khan Wazir echoed the hospital’s tally and told Dawn.com, “The young men were playing volleyball when the quadcopter fired shells on them.”
He added that people in the area were “scared and restricted to their homes after the attack”.
Wazir, in a post on Facebook, strongly condemned the “drone attack in which innocent citizens were targeted”. He demanded that the federal government and the relevant institutions “immediately investigate the incident, provide justice to the affected families, and take immediate and effective steps to prevent such attacks in the future”.
“Targeting common people under the guise of an attack on a Taliban post is extremely regrettable, shameful and unacceptable,” Wazir claimed, terming the incident a “part of a heinous conspiracy to sabotage regional peace”.
The incident comes within a fortnight after a suspected quadcopter munitions drop claimed the lives of four children and injured five others in North Waziristan District’s Mir Ali tehsil. The military clarified that security forces were “falsely implicated” in the incident and that it was carried out by the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
Locals there staged a sit-in for over a week with the victims’ bodies, demanding justice, before finally announcing today that they had ended their protest after reaching an agreement with the local administration.
