Pakistan's nuclear bases targeted by al-Qaeda Report Says

Pakistan’s nuclear weapon bases have been attacked by al-Qaeda and the Taliban at least three times in the last two years, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

The allegations, by a leading British expert on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, increased fears that terrorists could acquire a nuclear device or could trigger a nuclear disaster by bombing an atomic facility.

Dean Nelson wrote in a paper for the respected anti-terrorism journal of America’s West Point Military Academy, Professor Gregory, director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at Bradford University, detailed three attacks since November 2007 and raised spectre of more incidents could be happened in the future.

He said in The Daily Telegraph that militants had struck a nuclear storage facility at Sarghoda on 1 Nov 2007; launched a suicide bomb assault on a nuclear air base at Kamra on 10 December 2007; and set off explosions at entrance points to Wah containment, one of Pakistan’s main nuclear assembly plants in August 2008.

However, Dr Anupam Srivastava, director of the centre for international Trade and Security at Georgia University, who has advised the US government on nuclear security issues, told The Daily Telegraph he believed there had been more than three attacks on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities and the al-Qaeda militants would intensify its assaults.

The attack on Wah, Dean Nelson wrote that was at the time as the deadliest terrorist strike against Pakistan’s armed forces, with 63 people killed in two suicide bombing.
The target was referred to as major conventional weapons and ammunition on manufacturing factory, but Prof Gregory and other analysts do not agree and said it is in fact an assembly plant for nuclear warheads.

“These sites are all identified by various authorities as nuclear weapons or related sites,” Prof Gregory said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons establishments are protected with heavily armed soldiers who patrol a wide security cordon, while inside state-of-the-art sensors intruders.
Other security facilities including employees are screened by vetting staff from its Strategic Plans Division and officials from its ISI intelligence service.

Warheads, detonators and launch vehicles are stored separately to prevent them being seized together.

However despite this “robust” security system, Prof Gregory said the facilities remain vulnerable because they re located in areas where “Taliban and Qaeda are more than capable of launching terrorist attack”, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Taleban Leader Killed in US Missile Strike

Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s top Taleban commander, described by Times Online as “the country’s most wanted man”, has been killed in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) missile strike, officials disclose today.

The Tehrik-e-Taleban Pakistan, the group he headed, said the 35-year-old was killed early on Wednesday at his father-in-law’s house in South Waziristan.

According to Times Online the militant commander, who was reportedly blamed for dozens of suicide bombings and the murder of the former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto, has been seriously ill with a kidney ailment.

He was spending the night on the roof of the compound when the missiles, fired by an unmanned drone, hit in the early hours.

BBC News Online reports after the incident happened, the Taliban leader gathered in South Waziristan to choose a successor.

Local sources told the BBC reporter Abdul Hai Kakar, based in Peshawar, that the three candidates under the consideration for succeeding Baitullah Mehsud at the moment are Hakimullah Mehsud, Maulana Azmatullah, and Wali-ur-Rehman.

Shah Mahmood Quresh, Pakistani Foreign Minister said that no officials had yet seen Mehsud’s body, but the authorities would send a team to the site of the strike to verify his death.

Mr Qureshi said: “To be 100-per cent sure, we are going for ground verification and once the ground verification re-confirms, which I think is almost confirmed, then we’ll be 100-per cent sure,” Times Online reports.

According to the BBC Kafayat Ullah, who was described as an aide to Baitullah Mehsud, told the Associated Press by telephone on Friday 7 August, that his leader had been killed along with his second wife by a US missile, but he has no further details.

Zahid Hussain wrote on the Times Online that Mehsud is reportedly thought to have had some 20,000 men under his command and had a $5 million US bounty on his head after Washington branded him “a key al-Qaeda facilitator”.

Only until last month, the US envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, branded him “one of the most dangerous and odious people in the entire region”.

An intelligence source in South Waziristan said that Mehsud had already been buried after the strike in Zangar village in the Ladha region.

The Taliban military group emerged in the early 1990s in northern Pakistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

The Taliban is a predominantly Pashtun movement, and came to prominence in Afghanistan in the autumn of 1994.

In recent years, the re-emergence of the hardline Islamic Taliban movement has been regarded as a fighting force in Afghanistan and a major threat to Pakistani government.