Top rebel commander, 4 others killed in tribal area

PESHAWAR: Pakistan’s military says security forces shot and killed a local militant commander along with four of his associates in a raid on Monday near the border with Afghanistan.

It identified the slain commander as Wasim Zakaria and said he was involved in multiple atacks on security forces. The military said he was also involved in the killing of Zubaidullah Khan, a federal housing official who was gunned down in May while visiting his village in North Waziristan to celebrate the Islamic festival of Eid Al Fitr.

In another incident, at least eight miners were killed and seven were injured when a marble mine collapsed on Monday in the country’s northwest, police said.

Rescue workers were still trying to pull out several trapped miners, said Tariq Khan, a district police officer in the town of Mohmand on the Afghan border. He said the cause of the cave-in was not known.

In an unrelated development, authorities have unearthed a visa scam that links over 14,000 foreign nationals who allegedly got processed their travel documents by submiting either bogus, forged, invalid, fake or incomplete credentials in past two years, said a report.

The communications of the Ministry of Interior (MOI), Directorate General of Immigration and Passports (DGIP) and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) revealed that over two dozen officials had commited gross violation of Pakistan’s visa policy ater processing over 14,000 visa applications (visit, business and work) in a slipshod manner and thus placing vital security interests of the country at risk during this period.

It has been claimed that business visa has become more of a racket or mafia working for the advancement of interests of foreigners in Pakistan.

Cases have also been identified where visa/ visa extensions were given without any verification, nor the credentials of foreign applicants were checked against blacklist. No policy was followed by the concerned section for extensions of visas and personal whims being used to facilitate foreigners who were fake or possessed doubful credentials by origin.

The report said a total of 13,671 records of visas extensions were processed in the last one year from Lahore.