The chief minister has ordered immediate removal of Commissioner Bannu Abdullah Mehsud, IG Prison KP, Arshad Majeed Mohmand, DIG Bannu Range Muhammad Iftikhar Khan and Deputy Superintendent Central Jail Bannu, Muhammad Zahid from their offices till further orders, officials informed. Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said “a probe committee will try to find out whether the jail break in Pakistan, claimed by local Taliban, had any link to coordinated attacks in Afghanistan.”
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This state of affairs show that today a jail has been targeted and tomorrow the militants can storm Governor and Chief Minister houses and one can imagine the implication and consequences. There is also something seriously wrong with intelligence gathering, which should be the priority of our agencies in a challenging situation we are in .
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In one of the biggest jailbreaks in the country’s history, between 100
and 200 heavily armed Taliban attacked the Bannu jail early morning on
Sunday to free Adnan Rashid, an ex-Air Force employee condemned to death
by a military court for the 2003 assassination attempt on ex-president
General (retd) Musharraf. In the process, they also freed 384 of the 944
prisoners in the jail, of whom a handful returned voluntarily and still
fewer were rearrested. Smashing the main gate of the prison open, the
terrorists came with a well-coordinated plan that included attacking
from all sides of the prison while blocking all the approach roads to
cut off reinforcements. While the attack was a classic manoeuvre, the
guards inside the prison hardly put up even a token resistance and
obeyed the orders of the attackers to stand aside. The Taliban’s
intelligence seemed to know exactly where Adnan Rashid was being held.
The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed responsibility. The
attackers operated at will for about two hours inside the prison, with
nary any sign of reinforcements, although the prison authorities later
claimed news of the attack had been relayed almost immediately. The
police reinforcements arrived after the attackers had withdrawn, making
even their precautionary blockade of routes leading to the prison
unnecessary. As is usual in such matters, an inquiry has been ordered to
investigate the lack of response or resistance by the staff and guards
of the prison, why the movement of such large numbers of armed
terrorists riding vehicles went undetected, whether the attackers had
inside support (given their accurate intelligence), and last but not
least, a probing of the massive intelligence and security failure.
As in many instances over the years since the TTP and affiliated groups
took up arms against the state, it is by now obvious that no place in
the country is adequately protected or safe, from north to south (to jog
the memory, the attack on the Mehran base in Karachi will suffice). In
their usual fashion, the authorities have now set up check posts on all
routes leading out of Bannu, particularly towards the tribal areas. This
is a classic case of bolting the stable gate after the horse has long
fled. Alarmingly, there are reports in the media that Adnan Rashid,
whose appeals against his death sentence have been rejected by the High
and Supreme Courts, enjoyed the ‘facility’ of a cell phone in all the
prisons he was kept in, and even had access to social networks on the
internet, on which he regularly posted messages. The cell phones, taken
away at times but soon restored, allowed Adnan Rashid to keep in touch
with various journalists. None of these champions of the media thought
it their duty to report the fact to the authorities, no doubt in the
hope of exclusive information/stories from Adnan Rashid.
There are many serious problems with the manner in which we are
conducting the campaign against terrorists of various hues and shapes.
Our judicial system is not equipped, either in law or prosecution
capacity, to meet the challenge of putting terrorists away. The recently
concluded International Judicial Conference in Islamabad admitted as
much when no less than the Chief Justice of Pakistan remarked that
Pakistan’s laws needed to be brought into conformity with international
legal provisions against terrorism. Our intelligence and security
services and the police are woefully inadequately equipped, conceptually
or in practice, to combat the most serious existential threat the state
has faced in its entire history. The Bannu jailbreak is only the latest
demonstration of this fact. Everything is ‘business as usual’,
notwithstanding occasional reactive steps whenever an incident like
Bannu occurs. Unfortunately, inertia sets in all too soon and this
return to the usual laxity is what the terrorists rely on and wait for
before taking action. What Pakistan needs is an overarching
anti-terrorism agency able to coordinate federal and provincial law
enforcement authorities, provide the requisite training to
anti-terrorism outfits, and raise if necessary specialised units and
experts dedicated to wiping out this scourge. Relying on our normal
intelligence, security and law enforcement machinery is unlikely to
prove equal to the task.
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Daily Times
Thank You For Reading.
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