Word: mehsud
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...after Bhutto was killed, Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, held a press conference, on Musharraf's instructions, to pin the assassination on Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed last August in a rocket strike in South Waziristan - a claim later supported by the CIA. According to the report, it was no secret that Pakistan's militants loathed Bhutto and her stance against Islamist violence. But the Musharraf government's "hasty" announcement, the report says, "was premature at best" and "prejudiced the police investigations which had not yet begun...
...involvement of jihadists is not ruled out by the report, nor is the possibility that Mehsud - once an ISI asset - may have been involved. But it suggests his potential involvement would have formed part of a broader conspiracy. The report also does not rule out the involvement of elements within Pakistan's powerful military establishment...
...easy. Consider this scene: at a dusty army camp in Dera Ismael Khan a few weeks back, Pakistan's army commander Ashfaq Parvez Kayani summoned elders, or maliks, from the Mehsud tribe who had been hiding in Karachi, Peshawar and Islamabad from Taliban assassins. Eyewitnesses recount that the elders were so scared of being spied on by the Taliban that they rolled up to the army chief's office with the car windows plastered over with newspapers so their faces couldn't be seen...
...with good reason. General Khan reckons that the Pakistani Taliban have killed over 500 tribal elders since 9/11 for supposedly collaborating with Islamabad and Washington. Even after assurances from the army chief, the Mehsud elders are still afraid to venture back to their lands. "The jihad has eliminated the old tribal system of maliks," says General Khan. "Now any crook with a cell phone can call up a gang of his militant friends for any kind of mischief, and everyone is too afraid to stop them." His former colleague, Brigadier Mahmoud Shah, formerly in charge of security for the Northwest...
...Pakistani territory thus far this year, according to the Long War Journal, a nonprofit online publication that tracks such attacks. The spike was triggered in part by a Dec. 30 suicide attack that killed seven CIA officials at an Afghan outpost. The Haqqani network and Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud apparently aided the suicide bomber; some reports say Mehsud was wounded, possibly killed, in a Jan. 14 strike. Meanwhile, the remote-control pilots operating Predators and Reapers continue to peer at their video screens, hoping to catch sight of a very tall, thin, bearded man emerging from a hideout...