Eight killed as militants attack army base

LANDI KOTAL: Suspected Taliban militants fired a rocket that killed eight people in a northwest Pakistan town Thursday, in an attack targeting security forces near a key supply route for international forces in Afghanistan, an official said.

The militants fired three rockets near a base used by security forces in the town of Landi Kotal, about 10 kilometers west of the Afghan border, said Rashid Khan, an area government administrator.

One of them hit the town's commercial area, killing at least eight people, injuring more than 30 and setting fire to a timber yard and a string of nearby shops, Khan said. The other two struck villages outside town, and it was not immediately known if there were casualties there.

‘The death toll could rise because we are still searching through the rubble in the dark,’ Khan said.
Soon after the attack the security forces resorted to heavy firing and artillery shelling targeting suspected locations of the militants.

The town lies in tribal region on a key road where militants have carried out a wave of attacks on trucks carrying supplies to US and Nato troops in Afghanistan.

The security forces had launched an operation on Dec 28, 2008, in the agency which was extended to Landi Kotal in Jan last. A local militant Hazrat Ali, brother of a radical cleric Hazrat Nabi alias Tamanche Mullah, had accepted responsibility of the earlier attacks.

He is also suspected of being involved in attacks on the container-trucks passing through the area while carrying goods for Nato forces in Afghanistan.