PAKISTAN: Pakistan surveillance footage shows students in destroyed Bajaur madrasa performing alleged militant exercises days ahead of raid.

Pakistan has broadcast a government surveillance footage, taken a week before the military raided a madrasa which was believed to have links with al Qaeda, showing students in the school allegedly performing military exercises. The footage was aired on the state-run Pakistan TV as thousands all over the nation prepared to take to the streets on Friday (November 3) to protest the air strike on the madrasa that killed more than 80. Earlier in the week reporters were shown the aerial footage shot through a night vision lens revealing rows of men exercising before daybreak, just an hour before the missiles struck the compound. Al Qaeda Number Two Ayman al-Zawahri was a past visitor to a madrasa destroyed by a Pakistan Army helicopter attack, but he was not there when the missiles struck earlier this week. Several other al Qaeda luminaries had passed through the religious school run by pro-Taliban cleric Maulana Liaqatullah, who was killed in the airstrike along with around 80 of his followers, the officials told reporters a day after the attack. Among the other known militants to have frequented the madrasa at Chenagai village, near the Afghan border in the Bajaur tribal region of northwest Pakistan, was Abu Obaida al-Misri. An Egyptian, like Zawahri, al-Misri was identified as the mastermind of a plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners flying from London's Heathrow airport that was foiled earlier this year. The officials say he was a mentor to Rashid Rauf, a British Muslim arrested in Pakistan in August, who was said to be a key figure in the conspiracy. No major militant figure was believed to have been present when the army attacked, and orders for the assault were given in anticipation that the militants were about to be sent to fight -- possibly to launch suicide attacks on NATO and Afghan forces deep in Afghanistan. "The madrasa was under surveillance since July when the activity started picking up pace," said a senior official. Last January, a CIA-operated Predator missile attack targeted Zawahri in Bajaur's Damadola village near the Afghan border. Intelligence officials said a handful of al Qaeda operatives at a parley hosted by Liaqatullah were killed. But Zawahri was a no-show and reports that al-Misri was killed proved incorrect. The Pakistan government had been trying to persuade militant tribesmen to agree peace terms along the lines of accords brokered earlier in the two most restive tribal regions -- North and South Waziristan. But officials said Liaqatullah and his comrade Maulana Faqir Mohammad, who rallied fighters at the site of the destroyed madrasa immediately after the attack, ignored all warnings. Tribesmen said the dead, mostly young men aged between 15 and 25, were merely students. But, President Pervez Musharraf, speaking at a seminar in Islamabad, said they were all militants. Nowhere is Musharraf's alliance with the United States more unpopular than in the Pashtun tribal belt straddling the Pakistan-Afghan border. The tribesmen in Khar showed their loyalty with shouts of "Long Live Osama" and "Long Live Mullah Omar". A mountainous region that is difficult to access, Bajaur lies across from the eastern Afghan province of Kunar, where U.S. troops are hunting al Qaeda and Taliban militants. In contrast to Waziristan, the army has so far not put troops on the ground in Bajaur, though they man border posts there. Islamist politicians said the attack on the school was really carried out by a U.S. Predator drone aircraft, but Pakistan's military spokesman and a U.S. spokesman in Kabul denied it.

ITN Source | November 3, 2006

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