At least 26 people were killed and seven injured on Friday morning in Dera BugtiÂ’s Bekar area in Balochistan when the vehicle carrying them hit a landmine. According to Raziq Bugti, the spokesman of the Balochistan government, the people, mostly women and children, were on their way to attend a wedding in a trailer attached to a tractor. It was not clear who planted these landmines and contradictory statements came from the nazim of Dera Bugti and the Balochistan government spokesman. Kazim Bugti, the Dera Bugti district nazim, said that Bugti tribesmen and security forces had installed these landmines. However, Raziq Bugti said that security forces had not planted the landmines.
| We see carnage, death and destruction every day as we try to follow happenings in the Wonderful World of Terror. Every once in awhile one of them jumps out and gets me. 26 people, most of them women and kiddies, riding in a trailer on a farm tractor, all happy and wearing their good clothes, killed for no reason but pure viciousness is one of them. I can't think of a reason for any competently led military force to lay mines at random in an area with civilian traffic. Maybe I can see along the entire length of the Sui gas line, but not in a civilian area. That certainly doesn't say the Pak army's not capable of doing such a thing — the key words in this case being "competently led." But my suspicions would fall on Akbar Bugti's minions. Akbar is now living in a cave, rather than in his heavily fortified manse in Dera Bugti, and I'll be real happy when he's dead, though probably not as happy as the inhabitants of his little fiefdom. |