News / Pakistan

Some 80 Pakistani militants surrender in North Waziristan

Friday, 15 January 2016 11:09 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 16 January 2016 12:17 AM ]

Militants hand over their weapons during a surrender ceremony in Quetta, Pakistan, October 29, 2015. (Xinhua)

Some 80 pro-Taliban militants have surrendered to government forces in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border.

The men who laid down arms on Friday were from a militant group led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur and affiliated with the terrorist Haqqani network.

A Pakistani security official and three tribal sources involved in negotiating a deal between the government and the militants confirmed the rare incident.

Tribal leaders, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed cautious hope that more militants might follow suit.

"I believe this is the beginning and many more will follow them if the surrendered militants are given amnesty," one tribal leader said.

The development follows a drop in overall Taliban violence in Pakistan, partly due to an anti-Taliban military offensive in North Waziristan since June 2014, when a deadly raid on the Karachi International Airport ended the government’s faltering peace talks with the militants.

Pakistan’s army intensified its military operations after pro-Taliban elements killed over 150 people, most of them children, in an armed assault on a school in the northwestern city of Peshawar in December 2014. Pakistani officials say over 3,400 militants have been killed since the launch of the operation.

Also on Friday, Pakistani security officials said the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed Takfiri militant group, Maulana Masood Azhar, has been taken into "protective custody" amid a probe to find whether he is linked to a recent attack on an Indian airbase. Some 25 other members of the militant group have also been detained.

Gunmen, dressed in Indian army uniforms and suspected to be from the Jaish-e-Mohammed, attacked the Pathankot airbase in India’s northern state of Punjab on January 2. The four-day-long raid claimed the lives of seven Indian soldiers and all six assailants.

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