PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 22, (Agencies): Taleban militants have released a video showing the execution of 15 Pakistani soldiers whose bodies were found earlier this month after they were kidnapped in northwestern Pakistan.
The Tehreek-e-Taleban Pakistan had claimed responsibility for the killings. The 15 FC (Frontier Constabulary) personnel were kidnapped late last month after a night-time raid on a checkpoint in the northwestern town of Tank.
Pakistan’s seven tribal districts near the Afghan border, including North Waziristan, are rife with homegrown insurgents and are strongholds of Taleban and al-Qaeda operatives.
The 2.38 minute video, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, was released late Saturday and shows the blindfolded soldiers sitting in three rows on a hillside.
The soldiers had their hands tied behind their backs and were flanked by two masked gunmen.
A middle-aged soldier, who identifies himself as Babar Khan, says in the video that he was captured with the others by Taleban militants who stormed their outpost late at night.
Then an unidentified Taleban commander wearing a leather jacket appears and says the group was taking revenge for the killing of 12 Taleban fighters in Khyber tribal district.
“We warn the government of Pakistan to stop killing our people whom they have arrested and if they continue to do so then Taleban will (kill) them like this,” he says, before he starts shooting the captured soldiers with a Kalashnikov rifle, raising the slogan Allah-o-Akbar (God is great).
Other militants join him in shooting the captured soldiers.
FC commandant Majeed Khan Marwat told AFP that he had received the video and said that his men had been “martyred”.
Officials said that the men were killed in Shawa, a small town in the North Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border.
Other fighters step up and take turns pumping bullets into the men, some wearing green military uniforms. Each time a soldier collapses, the man standing next to him is pulled in that direction by the handcuffs.
The Taleban and Pakistan’s military, one of the largest in the world, have entered exploratory peace talks that raised hopes that their conflict, which has killed thousands of people, could ease, or even end one day.
But the talks have faltered, a senior Pakistani security official told Reuters, and the video — copied to compact discs and distributed in street markets in areas near the porous border with Afghanistan — is likely to enrage the army.
Formed in 2007, the TTP is an umbrella group of Pakistani militant factions operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Allied with the Afghan Taleban and al-Qaeda, it pledged to overthrow the Pakistani government after the military started operations against militant groups.
It is blamed for many of the suicide bombings across the country and has carried out audacious attacks, including one on army headquarters near the capital Islamabad in 2009.
After the shooting ends in the video, the Taleban militants stare at the bodies slumped over on the earth.
“If the killing of our friends is not stopped, this will be the fate of all infidel armies, God willing,” says one militant.
Majeed Marwat, a commander of the Frontier Corps said morale among his men would always remain high despite such videos.
“Our soldiers enlist because they want to sacrifice for the country. We are taking care of the families of the martyred soldiers,” he told Reuters.