ISLAMABAD, Nov 28: Denied a speech in the Senate, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao used a news conference on Tuesday to defend a deadly strike on a madressah in Bajaur as a pre-emptive knockout of a ‘terrorist sanctuary’, but declined to say who fired the missiles that killed 83 people.
The minister had just begun his speech to wind up a three-day Senate debate on the October 30 strike on the madressah and an apparently retaliatory suicide bombing on November 8 that killed 42 army recruits at Dargai in the NWFP when religious parties walked out in protest, leaving the upper house with lack of quorum before being prorogued.
This was the second time in 15 days that the opposition prevented Mr Sherpao from speaking in parliament, after a National Assembly session broke up for lacking quorum at the end of a similar debate on November 14.
Senators of the religious parties grouped in the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) were apparently provoked by the minister's charge that they were trying to take a political mileage from the Bajaur incident for gains in the next general elections as they used the US invasion of Afghanistan for unprecedented gains in the 2002 elections.
The MMA walkout left the 100-seat house far short of a quorum of its one-fourth or 25 members, forcing Deputy Chairman Jan Mohammad Jamali to announce an early prorogation of the opposition-convened session after the ringing of bells failed to bring back absentees from the treasury benches, including ministers. The absence even provoked the ire of some ruling party senators.
A furious Sherpao repeated the charge of giving political and religious colour to the Bajaur incident at the news conference called immediately afterwards at the parliament house but, in what seemed to be a harder government line against the religious parties in recent weeks, said: "The windfall they got from the Afghan situation will not be available this time."
He said the October 30 strike in Bajaur Agency's Mamoond tehsil had followed a series of deadly attacks on paramilitary forces, a campaign of intimidation engineered by foreign militants and government warnings, and that information received from video, technical and human sources showed the seminary, with a basement, being used as an Al Qaeda sanctuary where a lot of trainees were potential suicide bombers who could have killed thousands of people.
"It's war on terror... and if we pre-empted (such a disaster), it is creditable," the minister said.
MISSILE FIRING NOT OWNED UP: But he declined to answer when asked who had fired the missiles on the madressah, and only said: "See the result."
Other government spokesmen have repeatedly said that the strike was carried out by the country's own forces rather than by US forces in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Opposition parties and most residents of the area say the strike was the work of an unmanned US drone that had flown from Afghanistan in the second such attack in the Bajaur area in 10 months after a similar strike by four US drones killed 18 civilians in the nearby Damadola village on January 13.
During the Senate debate earlier in the morning, in which at least a dozen speakers from both sides of the house took part, MMA's Prof Khurshid Ahmad said it was humiliating that the government had "chosen to take responsibility for this American aggression" and held President Pervez Musharraf personally responsible for "this mass murder of students".
He called for a high-powered investigation either by parliament members or a judicial commission of Supreme Court judges to establish the guilt and for an immediate review of the government's foreign policy both in respect of "collusion with America" in Afghanistan and the overall role of Pakistan in the so-called war against terror.
Senator Babar Awan of the PPP Parliamentarians, which did not take part in the MMA walkout but insisted on a count in the house to decide if it had the quorum, also called for a Senate commission to probe the incident. They said if the government could not tell the truth, house members should be allowed to visit Bajaur.
POSITIVE LEADS ON DARGAI: Mr Sherpao told the news conference that the government had "got some positive leads" in the investigation of the Dargai suicide bombing, including ‘linkages’ with Bajaur and that "some people are being interrogated".
He declined to elaborate ‘positive leads’ but said: "It means we are going in the right direction."
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