Pakistan’s Leader Defends Airstrike on School
Faced with protests across the country, President Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday defended a military strike that killed 80 people at a religious school, and insisted that the dead were militants undergoing terrorist training.
General Musharraf said the dead were militants, and Pakistani military officials maintained that the madrasa was being used as a staging post for Al Qaeda and that it was frequently visited by Qaeda leaders.
Some local residents and opposition politicians have said that there were children in the school, and alleged that American warplanes had taken part in the attack. But the president dismissed the suggestion that the dead were innocent.
“Anyone who is saying that these were innocent Taliban is telling lies,”
General Musharraf said while addressing a seminar in Islamabad, the capital.
ABC News is reporting the bombing was actually carried out by a U.S. Predator drone. Sources tell ABC that Al Qaeda’s Ayman al Zawahiri was the intended target. Pakistan is denying the ABC report but it has admitted it relied on U.S. intelligence to carry out the bombing.
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