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Police: Pakistani girl forced to wear suicide-bomb vest
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Photo
Sohana Jawed, left, a nine year old Pakistani girl sits with police chief Salim Marwat during a news conference in Lower Dir in Timergarah, Pakistan on Monday, June 20, 2011. A 9-year-old girl who was kidnapped on her way to school and forced to wear a suicide vest managed to escape her captors Monday as they directed her to attack a paramilitary checkpoint in northwest Pakistan. (AP Photo/M. A. Khan)
Associated Press
TIMERGARAH, Pakistan
Police said Monday that militants kidnapped a 9-year-old girl on her way to school and forced her to wear a suicide-bomb vest. The girl and police said she managed to escape her captors as they directed her to attack a paramilitary checkpoint in northwest Pakistan.
Sohana Jawed, who is in third grade, said she was abducted near her home in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Saturday and taken to Lower Dir district, a four hours’ drive away, where she was found Monday.
Police in Lower Dir presented Jawed at a news conference, where she told her story dressed in her blue- and-white school uniform. But police in Peshawar said they haven’t received a complaint of a missing girl and haven’t identified a resident with her name.
Initial police reports of security incidents in Pakistan sometimes are wrong.
Jawed said during the news conference that she was grabbed by two women while on her way to school and forced into a car carrying two men.
One of the kidnappers put a handkerchief over her mouth that knocked her unconscious, Jawed said in a separate interview with a local TV station.
When she woke up and started crying, one of the women gave her cookies laced with something that again knocked her out, Jawed said. The next time she woke up she found herself in a strange home, she said.
“This morning, the women and men forced me to put on the heavy jacket and put me in the car again,” said Jawed.
The suicide vest contained nearly 20 pounds of explosives and seemed to be designed to be set off remotely, Lower Dir police Chief Salim Marwat told The Associated Press.
The kidnappers brought her to a checkpoint run by the paramilitary Frontier Corps located about 6 miles outside Timergarah, the main town in Lower Dir district. When they got out of the car, she sprinted toward the paramilitary soldiers to show them what she was wearing, said Marwat.
By the time the paramilitary soldiers realized what was happening, the kidnappers had escaped, said Marwat. Police have launched a search operation to find them, he said.