By Muhammad Najeeb, IANS
Islamabad : While the Pakistan government claims the militants who took schoolchildren hostage in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) surrendered with their weapons before a local tribal council, a member of the negotiating team Tuesday said the men released the students only after being offered a safe passage.
Islamic militants Monday took hostage about 270 schoolchildren and teachers at Domaili in the tribal NWFP region for several hours.
Haji Karimullah, who was in the team negotiating the release of the hostages, told IANS the armed militants were smugglers and took the children hostage when security personnel chased them to the school. However, he did not reveal the identities of the terrorists.
“We have promised them that their identity will not be revealed,” he said.
He said the local tribal council, called jirga, immediately gathered near the school and entered into negotiations with the terrorists on behalf of the security forces. The men released the hostages after they were guaranteed a safe passage.
When asked if the decision to give a safe passage to the militants will encourage other criminals, Karimullah said: “The life of 300 people is much more important than killing the smugglers.”
Although Karimullah insists the men who took the children hostage were “only smugglers” and not “anti-state agents”, Pakistan’s interior ministry has said the militants were heavily armed and unsuccessfully tried to kidnap a medical officer as a human shield before storming into the school. The doctor’s guards allegedly fired upon the terrorists, killing one of them.
“They surrendered themselves to the local jirga along with their weapons and released the children,” Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Cheema told reporters, contradicting Karimullah’s claim that they have been provided a safe passage.
Reacting to the incident, President Pervez Musharraf said it appeared that the militants had not intended to take any hostages.
“They were extremists who were being tailed and they took refuge in the school. They didn’t really go there to take the children as hostages,” he told reporters in London Monday evening.
Karimullah equated Monday’s incident to the hostage crisis following the 1999 hijack of an Indian Airlines plane by terrorists.
He told IANS: “Initially, the security forces were not ready to allow a safe passage to the armed militants but I convinced them after giving them the example of the Indian plane. I asked them if India could release terrorists in exchange for the safe release of its passengers, why couldn’t we do this?”
He was referring to the Indian Airlines Flight IC-814, which was hijacked by five men after it took off from Kathmandu Dec 24, 1999. It had 180 passengers and crew on board.
The plane was taken towards Pakistan but later landed at Amritsar airport. It then took off again and finally landed at Kandahar city in southern Afghanistan.The hijackers sought and secured the release from Indian prisons of dreaded terrorists, including Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) chief Maulana Azhar Masood.
One passenger was killed in the hijacked aircraft but others were released after a seven-day ordeal at Kandahar. The then Indian external affairs minister Jaswant Singh flew with the terrorists to be released at Kandahar to secure the release of the passengers on board the plane.