QUETTA, Pakistan, Oct 6, (Agencies): One person was killed Wednesday when at least 10 NATO oil tankers were set ablaze in the southwest Pakistan city of Quetta, senior police officials said — the fourth such attack in six days. Unknown gunmen attacked the terminal where up to 40 tankers were parked, and opened fire, senior police official Hamid Shakeel told AFP. “There are at least 10 tankers on fire. One person, apparently one of the staff members of the terminal, died as a result of gunfire,” he said. Another senior police official, Shah Nawaz, confirmed the incident in the city’s western outskirts, and the casualty.

The main land route for NATO supplies crossing from Pakistan to Afghanistan was closed for a seventh consecutive day, after a cross-border NATO helicopter attack that officials blamed for the deaths of three Pakistani soldiers. The alliance said it shot back in self-defence. NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen has urged Pakistan to reopen the vital route “as soon as possible”. Since the key route closed, local Taleban militants have claimed two raids in which nearly 60 trucks were torched, and vowed more attacks. Three people were killed in one incident when about 20 NATO oil tankers were set ablaze by attackers armed with Molotov cocktails near Islamabad.

In a similar incident on Friday in the south, heavily armed gunmen set fire to more than two dozen trucks and tankers carrying fuel for the 152,000-strong foreign forces fighting the Taleban-led insurgency in Afghanistan. Two NATO trucks were also torched by unknown assailants in the Qalat district of Baluchistan on Monday. Ambushes of NATO convoys are not uncommon, but are normally concentrated in the militant strongholds of the northwest. The Taleban said its attacks were to avenge US drone attacks and halt the NATO supply route through Pakistan.

The United States has massively increased its drone campaign in Pakistan’s lawless northwest tribal region on the Afghan border, which it calls the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda and is a hub of militants fighting in Afghanistan. An alleged al-Qaeda plot to attack European targets has put the Pakistani government’s performance against militants under scrutiny again, while the country reels from summer floods that left over 10 million homeless and heavily damaged the economy. A British man killed by an air strike in Pakistan had ties with the would-be Times Square bomber, a Pakistani intelligence official, who declined to be named, told Reuters. He said the Briton, Abdul Jabbar, had also been in the process of setting up a branch for the Taleban in Britain.

“He had some links to Faisal Shahzad but the nature of the ties are not clear,” the official said, referring to the Pakistani-born US citizen who was sentenced to life in prison in the United States on Tuesday for trying to set off a car bomb in New York’s busy Times Square. Those links are likely to fuel concerns that al-Qaeda and groups linked to it, such as Pakistan’s Taleban, which trained Shahzad, are becoming an increasing threat to Western nations.

Tehrik-e-Taleban Pakistan (TTP) in early September vowed to launch attacks in the US and Europe “very soon”. It had previously made similar threats but Shahzad’s plot was the closest it has come to success.
Before his sentencing, Shahzad denounced the presence of US and NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, described himself as the “first droplet of the flood that will follow” and mentioned al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.