Taliban Attack Kills 16 at Mosque at Pakistan Air Force Base

[DaNGeROuS KiLLeR]

 

 

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Taliban militants shot and killed 16 people in a mosque at an air force base near this city in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, military officials said, in the first major assault on a Pakistani military installation this year.

 

At least 13 attackers were killed in an intense firefight at the base, said Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, a spokesman for the Pakistani Army. Several people were wounded in the mosque attack, and an army captain was killed fighting the militants, he said.

 

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the dawn attack at the sprawling Badhaber air base, saying that 14 militants had taken part. A video released by the group showed a Taliban commander, Omar Mansoor, saying goodbye to fighters said to have been the ones who stormed the base.

 

The commander is believed to have been behind the massacre of more than 140 people, most of them children, at an army school in Peshawar in December. The attack Friday was the first major Taliban assault on a Pakistani military base since then.

 

The Badhaber base, about four miles west of Peshawar, was built by the United States in the late 1950s to intercept Soviet communications and as a base for reconnaissance flights, but it is now a training and residential facility, according to a security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media. “There are residential quarters and a mess for the airmen and a school,” the official said.

 

General Bajwa, the army spokesman, had said in an earlier statement that seven or eight militants had tried to break into the Badhaber base and that they had been “contained and surrounded.” But the military later said that 13 attackers had been killed. It released photos of five militants lying in pools of blood within the base.

 

Rescue workers said that 20 people had been wounded and taken to hospitals in Peshawar. “We are collecting details,” said Riaz Khan Mahsud, a local official.