Taliban kill 15 kidnapped Pakistan troops

The bodies of 15 members of Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Constabulary (FC) were found Thursday, almost two weeks after they were kidnapped from a northwestern town, officials said. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the killings. "We have received dead bodies of 15 kidnapped FC men", senior local FC commander Ali Sher Mehsud told AFP, revising the earlier death toll. He said that the FC men were killed in Shawa," a small town in the North Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border. All the corpses, which arrived in a military hospital in the northwestern Tal town, had bullet wounds, he added. A local intelligence official also confirmed the killings. The FC personnel were kidnapped late last month during a night-time attack on a checkpoint in the northwestern town of Tank. Pakistan's seven tribal districts near the Afghan border, including North Waziristan, are rife with homegrown insurgents and are strongholds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives. Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan claimed responsibility for the killings, telling AFP: "We have taken revenge for continued operations of security forces against us. They are in fact fighting for Americans." Islamist militants opposed to the government, particularly the nebulous Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) network, have carried out bomb and gun attacks killing more than 4,700 people across Pakistan since July 2007. But significantly, there has been no major Islamist militant attack in Pakistan since a suicide bomber killed 46 people, targeting an anti-Taliban militia at a funeral in the northwestern district of Lower Dir on September 15 last year. Pakistan has for years battled insurgents in the northwest and the tribal belt. More than 3,000 soldiers have died but Islamabad has resisted US pressure. The United States described Pakistani tribal regions as the most dangerous place on earth and asked Islamabad to take decisive action against militants especially in North Waziristan, a bastion of the Haqqani network. But Pakistan withstood US pressure to wage battle with the Afghan Taliban-allied Haqqani network, which is blamed for some of the worst attacks in Afghanistan. Pakistan's fragile alliance with the United States crashed to new lows on November 26, when NATO air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in what the Pakistan military called a deliberate attack. The air strikes were the latest in a series of crises last year that have brought the fragile Pakistani-US alliance to an all-time low. In January, a CIA contractor shot dead two Pakistanis and was taken into custody, accused of double murder. On May 2, a covert American raid killed Osama bin Laden near the capital without Washington informing the government. Pakistan refused to take part in the inquiry, having criticised previous investigations into cross-border attacks as worthless. Instead, it has sought a formal apology from US President Barack Obama. Islamabad has kept its Afghan border closed to NATO convoys since November 26, boycotted the Bonn conference on Afghanistan and ordered Americans to leave an air base understood to have been a hub for CIA drone strikes on the Taliban.