Pakistan offers bounty for top Taliban leaders

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Security forces fighting their way through a mountainous Taliban stronghold killed at least seven militants Sunday and injured several more, officials said, and Pakistan’s foreign minister said the offensive in tribal South Waziristan should finish sooner than originally expected.

As part of the government’s ramping up of its fight against the militants, it will offer bounties of up to 50,000,000 rupees ($600,000) for each of the top three Taliban leaders, according to an official advertisement to be published today in Pakistani newspapers and obtained by The Associated Press.

But the recent successes of the campaign in South Waziristan — and the optimism of Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi that it would soon achieve its objectives — were offset by a string of anti-government attacks in other tribal regions, where militants kidnapped and killed a prominent pro-government activist and blew up a school for girls.

The kidnapping occurred Saturday night in the town of Khar, the largest in the Bajur tribal region, when a group of about 60 militants stormed the house of Jahangir Khan, said Adalat Khan, a town official.

“The bullet-riddled body of Jahangir Khan was found a kilometer [half-mile] away from the main town, with his legs and hands tied with a rope,” he said. Khan had apparently been dragged before being shot, he said.

The same militants also kidnapped one of the town’s wealthiest landlords along with his son, his grandson and another relative. It was not immediately clear why they were kidnapped, though abductions for ransom have become increasingly common.

Pakistan launched a major offensive in Bajur last year and now insists it has total control nearly everywhere in the region, including in Khar — a claim undercut by the Saturday attacks and a series of other violent incidents in recent months.

Militants also blew up a girls’ school in the Khyber tribal region, the latest in the Taliban’s campaign against modern education that has destroyed hundreds of schools across Pakistan, said local official Ghulam Farooq Khan. The school’s guard and three of his relatives were injured in the Sunday attack in the town of Bara, near where seven Pakistani paramilitary soldiers were killed in a Saturday roadside bombing.

Despite such problems, Qureshi insisted things were going well in the its two-week-old offensive in South Waziristan, one of the semiautonomous tribal regions where the Taliban has grown in power in recent years.

The Sunday fighting, meanwhile, took place in Kaniguram, a Taliban stronghold where government forces are still fighting for control of about half of the village.

Nine militants have been killed in South Waziristan over the past 24 hours, according to an army statement. Two soldiers have also been killed.

Dozens of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition were seized across South Waziristan over the past day, the statement added, including rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, anti-tank mines, a missile launcher and jammers to interfere with government communications equipment.