|
MINGORA (Pakistan) - PAKISTANI pro-Taleban militants on Sunday said they would decide within days whether to call a permanent ceasefire in a wild region near the Afghan border after the government agreed to allow Islamic syariah law.
Muslim Khan, spokesman for militant leader Maulana Fazlullah, said the hardliners would review their current 10-day truce in the Swat valley when it runs out on Wednesday.
'We declared a 10-day ceasefire just after the agreement was signed and you will see an exemplary peace prevail in the valley once sharia is enforced,' Khan told AFP.
'In the next five or six days, our shoora (consultative council) is meeting and it will decide about a permanent ceasefire,' he said.
However, the kidnapping on Sunday of a Pakistani official and six bodyguards in Swat, created an obstacle to peace, a minister said.
District coordination officer (DCO) Khushhal Khan and six bodyguards were taken at gunpoint from a militant checkpost in the Minogra district, provincial information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said.
Muslim Khan, who earlier said that no kidnapping had taken place, later announced the release of the official and said that it had been done to send a message to the government that it should not violate the agreement.
'We have released the DCO and guards in exchange of release of our two colleagues,' he told AFP.
'The government has released two of our men and soon they will release the third. The government violated the agreement by arresting our men in Peshawar and killing in Dir (district) that is why we had do this,' Muslim Khan said. -- AFP
| 
