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ISLAMABAD: More than 400 students were feared abducted by Taliban militants in the North Waziristan tribal area on Monday.
According to reports on television, the staff and students of the Razmak Cadet College were abducted when they were travelling through the area in a convoy of vehicles.
Heavily armed men are reported to have stopped the convoy of 29 vehicles in the Mirali area.
17 escape
All details of the incident were not immediately clear, including the exact number of children. Mohammed Mirza, an adviser to the Prime Minister on tribal affairs, told Dawn News Television that of the total number of 500 mostly teenaged children who were leaving the boarding school after it closed for a break, only 17 managed to evade abduction. The rest had been abducted, most likely by Taliban militants, he said.
The crisis erupted on a day when President Asif Ali Zardari, along with Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, chaired a high-level meeting on the security situation in the wake of the ongoing military operation in Swat.
Retaliatory attacks threatened
The Pakistani Taliban have threatened to carry out retaliatory attacks in several cities if the Swat operations were not stopped. They are suspected to have carried out a bombing earlier in the day at a bus terminal in Kohat in the NWFP, in which two people were killed and 11 injured.
According to a Presidential spokesman, Mr. Zardari told the meeting, attended by the Army chief, heads of intelligence services and several Cabinet Ministers and high-ranking officials, that “the war against militancy is a total war and each and every section of society must rise to the occasion to defeat the mindset that creates and nurtures militancy.”
The combination of favourable domestic public opinion and the willingness of the international community to help had given the government an opportunity to eliminate the militants, and the mindset that creates them once and for all, Mr. Zardari is said to have told the meeting.
He also called for reforms in the education sector in order to produce tolerant, progressive and forward-looking youth.
source:hindu
