Ekip
19 October 2016•Update: 20 October 2016
By Aamir Latif
KARACHI, Pakistan
A suspected mastermind of a 2009 attack on the Pakistan army headquarters near the capital Islamabad has been killed in a security forces operation in northwest Pakistan, local media reported Wednesday.
Local TV channel Express News, quoting an unnamed senior security official, reported that Akbar Ali, a senior Pakistani Taliban commander, was killed in an "intelligence operation” in the remote Gomal town. No further details of the operation were given.
Nine army personnel, including a brigadier, and all but one of the 10 militants were killed in the attack which the army reacted to with a full-fledged operation on South Waziristan, the northwestern tribal area which was then the stronghold of the Taliban umbrella group, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
The lone surviving attacker Usman Punjabi was sentenced to death by an anti-terrorist court in 2011 and in 2014 became the first person to be executed after the government lifted a de-facto ban on the death penalty, in reaction to a Taliban attack that killed more than 140 people.
Since June 2014, Pakistan's army has been occupied by another full-scale operation in the northwestern tribal areas, where they claim to have killed more than 4,500 militants, mostly in North Waziristan and neighboring Khyber Agency.
The offensive has also displaced more than a million tribesmen, with only a third having managed to return despite the army claiming to have cleared 90 percent of the area of militants.
