| Pakistan Security Officials Describe Hotel Attack | |
| Islamabad 21 September 2008 |
Pakistani security officials have disclosed new details about Saturday's hotel bombing and released a video showing the attack. VOA's Barry Newhouse reports from Islamabad, where the interior ministry said the death toll has reached 53 people, including four foreigners.
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| View of destruction caused by bomb explosion at hotel in Islamabad, 20 Sep 2008 |
Rehman Malik said an estimated 600 kilograms of military grade explosives were mixed with aluminum powder - a highly flammable material. The bomb was packed inside a large dump truck that was also carrying construction materials - apparently to take advantage of city rules that allow large construction vehicles into the city after sunset.
Security camera footage released by officials showed a large truck attempting to ram the hotel gate. When the truck failed to breach the barrier, the driver appeared to detonate a small explosion inside the cab, catching the vehicle on fire and sending hotel guards fleeing. The vehicle then burned for several minutes, before the flames grew and eventually detonated the truck's massive payload.
Rehman Malik said officials have made no arrests, but suspect the perpetrators are linked to previous attacks.
"Unless I investigate, Im not at liberty to tell you who has done it. But previous investigations, all the roads have gone to South Waziristan," Malik said.
The tribal agency on the Afghan border is considered a stronghold of Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was also blamed in the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Officials said the four foreigners killed in the blast included two Americans, a Vietnamese citizen and the Czech ambassador to Pakistan.
No militant groups have claimed responsibility for the attack, but in the past spokesmen for the groups frequently call television and radio stations to take credit and criticize the government.
Rehman Malik urged the media not to give the militants a propaganda victory.
"I am requesting and appealing to the media to stop the glorification of those - those militants who are killing your brothers, your sisters," Malik said.
The top official in the interior ministry said the government plans to continue its plan for combating militancy in the tribal regions by distributing development aid, negotiating peace deals with willing partners, and using military strikes when necessary.
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| ေပါက္ကြဲမႈတြင္း ဒဏ္ရာရသူမ်ားကို ပါကစၥတန္ ရဲမ်ားက ကယ္ထုတ္ေနပံု (စက္တင္ဘာ ၂၀၊ ၂၀၀၈) |
စေနေန႔ေႏွာင္းပိုင္းမွာ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့တဲ့ ဒီေပါက္ကြဲမႈေၾကာင့္ ဟိုတယ္အ၀င္ေပါက္ လံုး၀ ေပ်ာက္ထြက္သြားၿပီး ဧည့္ခန္းေဆာင္ လည္း ပ်က္ဆီးကာ အေ၀းႀကီးက အေဆာက္အဦေတြ ေတာင္မွ တုန္ခါသြားခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ ေပါက္ကြဲမႈေၾကာင့္ ဟိုတယ္ ရဲ႕ ပင္မ ဓါတ္ေငြ႔ပိုက္လိုင္း ေပါက္ထြက္သြားၿပီး ဟိုတယ္တခုလံုး မီးဟုန္းဟုန္း ေတာက္ေနခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီအေဆာက္အဦ ၿပိဳက်ႏုိင္တယ္လို႔လည္း အာဏာပိုင္ေတြ က သတိေပးထားပါတယ္။
အထဲမွာ လူေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး ပိတ္မိေနေသးတာေၾကာင့္ ေသဆံုးသူ အေရအတြက္ ပိုမ်ားလာႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ ဒီေဖာက္ခြဲမႈအတြက္ ၁,၀၀၀ ကီလိုဂရမ္ ရွိတဲ့ ေဖာက္ခြဲေရးပစၥည္းေတြ သံုးထားလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ရဲ က ခန္႔မွန္းပါတယ္။
ေပါက္ကြဲမႈေၾကာင့္ ေပ ၅၀ ေလာက္က်ယ္တဲ့ က်င္းႀကီးလည္း ျဖစ္သြားခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ အခုထိေတာ့ တိုက္ခိုက္မႈအတြက္ ဘယ္သူကမွ ၀န္ခံလာတာ မရွိေသးပါဘူး။ ဒါေပမယ့္ လႊတ္ေတာ္နားမွာ ေပါက္ကြဲမႈ ျဖစ္ႏုိင္တယ္ ဆိုတဲ့ ေထာက္လွန္းေရး သတင္း ရထားတယ္ လို႔ေတာ့ ျပည္ထဲေရး ၀န္ႀကီးဌာန အႀကီးအကဲ က ေျပာပါတယ္။
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