Police in Pakistan say suspected militants have killed at least three people in another attack on oil tankers carrying fuel to NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Investigators say at least 20 oil tankers were set afire in the attack early Monday near Islamabad. In an interview, police superintendent Mir Wise says as many as 12 attackers opened fire at the site and then set some of the tankers on fire. It is the third attack on NATO convoys since Friday. The incident took place along a supply route that Pakistani authorities had closed last Thursday, apparently as a protest against a cross-border NATO air strike in Pakistan. Authorities in Pakistan say three of their soldiers were killed during the NATO raids, which were aimed at militants fleeing from Afghanistan. On Sunday, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States had indicated that the supply route would reopen this week.
In a television interview , Ambassador Hussain Haqqani said he expected the route would be open in less than a week. The Torkham border crossing along the Khyber Pass is on one of the main NATO supply routes through Pakistan into Afghanistan, where more than 152,000 US and NATO forces are fighting a Taliban-led insurgency. A sharp increase in attacks by unmanned planes flying over Pakistan and recent NATO border incursions have raised tensions between foreign forces and Islamabad. Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi will meet with NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels on Monday. In a separate development, Pakistani officials said the bullet-riddled bodies of three men were found Sunday in the country’s restive northwestern tribal region.
A note claiming the men were spies for the U.S. was found near the bodies. Discovery of the bodies came a day after two suspected U.S. drone attacks killed at least 16 militants in the region – Voanews
