PESHAWAR, July 25: A band of foreign militants who killed 10 Pakistani troops during a botched raid in the tribal belt last month, were fugitives from Uzbekistan, an official said on Thursday.

Authorities had initially identified the group as Chechens, and said they belonged to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

Pakistani paramilitaries and soldiers, on a tip-off from US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, launched a night raid on June 25 on a tribal elder’s sprawling mud-brick home where the militants were hiding out.

But the heavily-armed group fought back with grenades and machine guns. Two of the militants as well as the 10 Pakistani troops were killed in the shootout.

Military officials had said the fugitives were Al Qaeda terrorists who had slipped over the porous border from Afghanistan, and an interior ministry official said at least one of the dead was a Chechen.

But a senior official of South Waziristan Agency said further investigations had revealed that the militants belonged to a radical Uzbek group called the Islamist Movement of Uzbekistan.

“An ethnic Uzbek Afghan man who the group had hired to guard their hideout was captured, and he confessed to intelligence officers during interrogation that the group belonged to Uzbekistan,” the official told AFP, requesting anonymity.

“When it was further investigated it was learnt that they were affiliated with the Islamist Movement of Uzbekistan.” However the Uzbek Afghan guard identified the militants as Uzbeks from Uzbekistan, “including the two who were shot dead”.

More than 50 Uzbek militants had been hiding out in the mud home in Azam Warsak village, the captured man told interrogators.

The official believed the group had fled Afghanistan to avoid bombing raids and searches by the US-led military coalition, who are still trying to flush out Al Qaeda remnants after driving the Taliban regime from power late last year.—AFP