Pakistan's military believes the NATO airstrike on two border posts last month was pre-planned, media reports said Friday.
Major General Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general of military operations, rejected US and NATO claims that the attack was unintended and a mistake during a closed-door briefing Thursday before the Senate's defence committee, The Express Tribune reported.
The November 26 attack on two Pakistani border posts in the Mohmand tribal district along the Afghan border killed 24 soldiers and injured more than a dozen, DPA reported.
Nadeem charged the attack was a "pre-planned conspiracy" against Pakistan, ruling out that it was carried out in the pursuit of militants, the newspaper reported, citing an unnamed participant at the committee meeting.
The two check posts were set up in September and their locations given to the United States, Nadeem was quoted as saying.
The airstrikes has strained already tense relation between Pakistan and the US, two uneasy allies in the fight against terrorism. In retaliation, Pakistan closed NATO supply routes running through the country to landlocked Afghanistan, leaving hundreds of NATO oil tankers and trucks stranded and exposed to militant attacks.
Attackers fired four rockets Thursday night into a parking lot, torching 23 oil tankers in the Akhrootabad area near Quetta, the capital of the south-western province of Baluchistan.
"We are still trying to extinguish the fire," Abid Bukhari, a local police officer, said Friday.
...