PESHAWAR: At least 10 people were killed yesterday as pro-Taliban militants attacked the family residence of a member of parliament in North-Western Frontier Province (NWFP), officials said.
Around 150 to 200 heavily armed insurgents surrounded the house of Waqar Ahmad Khan in the Kabal area of the restive Swat valley and killed his brother Iqbal Khan, two nephews and seven bodyguards, police said.
“They used rockets and bombs in the attacks,” Swat police chief Tanveerul Hassan said. The insurgents took the women and children out and demolished the house with explosives. Waqar was not in the house when the attack took place.
A spokesman for radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah, who is leading an armed struggle for the enforcement of Taliban rule in Swat, accepted responsibility for the killings.
“This is our response to the mortar shelling by government forces in the area,” he told journalists by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Waqar is a member of the provincial assembly in NWFP and belongs to the liberal and secular Awami National Party that leads the provincial government.
Party spokesman Zahid Khan condemned the militant raid. “This is an act which stands in absolute violation of Islamic as well as local Pakhtun traditions,” he said.
A few hours after the attack the federal government in Islamabad banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the umbrella organisation of several militant groups, including that of Fazlullah. - DPA
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