The reports differ but the point is always the same:The Pakistani newspaper Dawn : Militants behead law-enforcement men in public
Militants on Friday publicly executed four law-enforcement personnel in a village, 16km west of Mingora, the district headquarters, and exchanged heavy gunfire with security forces in a nearby sub-district.The Associated Press via the International Herald Tribune : Militants decapitate 13 men seized in northwestern Pakistan, official says
“It was gruesome,” was how a resident of Shakkardarra described the scene of beheading of the law-enforcement personnel.
Requesting anonymity, he told Dawn on phone that masked militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles brought the four men to the village at around 5pm, fires a few shots in the air and then beheaded them.
The men, said to be in their mid-20s, had their hands tied together. They were pushed to the ground on the main Matta-Mingora road and had their heads chopped off.
“Let this serves as a warning to all those who spy for the government or help the government. All sons of Bush will meet similar fate,” the resident quoted one of the militants announcing shortly before the execution.
“We watched the gory scene in shock and horror. We felt so helpless. There was fear and gloom in the village,” he said.
There was no information about the identity of the beheaded men.
Locals said that two of them were from police and from the haircut and the sandals of the other two it appeared that they belonged to a paramilitary force.
Militants have executed 13 captives accused of being spies in apparent retaliation for an assault by security forces on the stronghold of a militant cleric in northwestern Pakistan, officials said Saturday.Riaz Khan of the AP via Google: Pakistani Militants Behead 4 Officers
The men, including six security personnel and seven civilians, were captured by militants at a roadblock they had set up on the outskirts of Swat district, said Home Secretary Badshah Gul Wazir, the top civilian security official of the North West Frontier Province where Swat is located.
Officials said earlier that 11 people had been kidnapped Friday.
A witness said he had seen six of the bodies with notes attached accusing them of being American agents.
A spokesman for the pro-Taliban cleric, Maulana Fazlullah, claimed the killings were carried out by local residents who back the militants' aims — although there was no other indication that villagers were responsible for the deaths.
"It was done by common people, who support us because we only want enforcement of Islamic laws," Sirajuddin, who goes by one name, told The Associated Press.
Wazir said the civilians were accused of being spies.
"The civilians were killed to terrorize the people. (The militants) say they were either informers or were supporting the government side," Wazir told the AP by telephone from Peshawar, the province's capital.
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Police recovered the remains of four of the kidnapped men — three Frontier Constabulary soldiers and one policeman — before dawn on Saturday, said Javed Shah, a local police official. He said villagers told police the executions were conducted Friday in public in Ningulai village, about three kilometers (two miles) from Imam Dheri.
"The masked militants, who were Maulana Fazlullah's men, displayed their heads and threw the severed heads and the remains of the three FC people and one policeman in a farm field," Shah said.
A few hours earlier, militiamen of the regional Frontier Constabulary, supported by army helicopters, attacked the redoubt of cleric Maulana Fazlullah, who runs a sprawling seminary in Imam Dheri and leads a band of armed militants.Abdul Hamid is right. Nobody knows what will happen in the future. But life in the GWOT doesn't look inviting to anybody.
Hundreds of villagers fled as the two sides battled across the rushing Swat River, firing rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and other weapons. Police said one militant was known dead and two civilians were killed by stray bullets near the river.
"I never saw this type of violence in my life," said Abdul Hamid, a 70-year-old shop owner in Swat, who sobbed as he watched thick smoke rising from trees set afire on a nearby mountain where fighting also broke out.
"Swat was one of the safest places on Pakistan, and now it has become Iraq and Afghanistan, and I don't know what will happen in future," Hamid said.