Lahore, Pakistan: Pakistani officials on Thursday said they had killed eight Al Qaida militants during a raid in the central city of Multan after learning of their plans to attack a local university.
The operation, which officials said was carried out on Wednesday night after an intelligence tip-off, occurred on the city’s outskirts, a spokesman for the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) of Punjab, told AFP on the condition of anonymity.
“On the basis of the information, a joint team of ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] and CTD Multan carried out a raid at the meeting point, near the village of Nawabpur on the bank of the river Chenab in Multan, resulting in intense fire from the militants,” he said.
The CTD official said the militants fired rockets and hand grenades during the encounter, and several were able to escape.
Two of the men who were killed were said to have murdered a senior military officer while another, Hafiz Abdul Mateen, was accused of masterminding a 2009 attack on a mosque in Rawalpindi that killed around 40 people.
No security officials were said to have been killed or injured in the raids, and authorities are routinely accused by rights groups of staging such encounters to carry out extrajudicial killings of people who are already in custody.
Mohammad Amir Rana, a senior security analyst, said none of the names disclosed by authorities were familiar, raising further questions.
“It’s true that Al Qaida exists in this region and an operation is also under way in Punjab against all kind of militants, but the names disclosed after this recent raid are not familiar,” he said.
In 2015, Pakistan stepped up a multi-pronged offensive against Islamist and other militants through military operations, raids, as well as a crackdown on some hardline seminaries and money laundering as part of its National Action Plan.
It came in the wake of a Taliban massacre at a Peshawar army school in December 2014 in which 134 children were killed.
