Associated Press  --  Arab News

ISLAMABAD, 24 June 2004 — The death toll from Pakistan’s recent crackdown on Al-Qaeda fugitives holed up near the Afghan border rose to 100 yesterday, when a senior official said troops killed 30 local tribesmen in addition to dozens of foreign militants.

Brig. Mahmood Shah, the head of security in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions, also said authorities were still uncertain whether any leading Al-Qaeda figures were among some 70 “foreign terrorists” who died in the operation earlier this month.

“We have no information about it,” Shah told The Associated Press.

The dead include Nek Mohammed, a renegade tribal leader accused of sheltering Al-Qaeda fugitives. He was killed last week in a missile strike on a mud-brick compound near Wana, the main town in South Waziristan. Six of his associates also died in the assault.

Shah said yesterday Nek Mohammed was a “criminal” and had been supporting Al-Qaeda suspects for “monetary gains.”

Shah said the tribal leader was targeted after admitting he was behind attacks on the army in South Waziristan and Karachi, where a senior military official earlier this month escaped an assassination attempt.

Shah said that, after Nek Mohammed’s death, local tribesmen were helping authorities in their efforts to trace and arrest Al-Qaeda figures “more willingly.”

He said troops had searched 172 homes in the area in the past two weeks. They found neither militants nor weapons, he said.

Meanwhile, eyewitnesses said security forces yesterday launched a fresh search operation for suspected Al-Qaeda and Taleban operatives in South Waziristan.

“They (troops) along with local chieftains began a house-to-house search in Shakai and Mandata areas early morning but thus far, they got nothing,” a resident, Allah Noor, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

Pakistan yesterday rejected the report of a US investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States which said Islamabad helped the Taleban regime in Afghanistan to shelter the Al-Qaeda.

“We think this view by the 9/11 commission is biased, partial and completely unscientific,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan told a weekly press briefing.