The death of Chinese workers in Pak is likely to force Beijing to ask Kabul to take stringent action against the TTP, which is exactly what Islamabad wants

Sometime between 31 March and 1 April, a report was submitted by the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD), which works under the direct supervision of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to the Pakistan Prime Minister’s office which was also shared with the Chinese embassy in Islamabad.

The report was prepared by officials investigating the 26 March attack on a bus carrying 5 Chinese workers by a suicide bomber, who rammed his car into the bus at Bisham block, Shangla district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (KPK).

These workers were going from Islamabad to Dasu, where Pakistan’s biggest hydropower project is being developed by China as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) under its Belt and Road Initiative.

The CTD has claimed that the terror attack was carried out by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and added that they had arrested at least 12 terrorists including the main facilitator, Hazrat Bilal, who, the CTD claimed, had brought the suicide bomber to be used in the attack from Afghanistan.

The TTP, which as a matter of practice is quick to take responsibility for any terror attack that it carries out, has denied being involved in the attack.

‘False Claims’

According to CTD’s findings, the explosives-laden vehicle was bought for Rs 0.25 million from Afghanistan and then driven to Chaman city located at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

From there it was taken to Dara Zinda town in Dera Ismail Khan district. From DI Khan, it was driven to Bisham in KPK. The CTD has further claimed that no custom duty was paid on the vehicle while bringing it from Afghanistan to Pakistan and it was parked at a petrol station in Chaman for Rs 500 per day, for at least 10 days, awaiting its driver.

However, local sources and people following the developments said the claims of CTD were false and were likely written to shift the anger of the Chinese officials from Islamabad towards Kabul.

The distance between Chaman and Bisham is more than 1,200 km and takes a driving time of 3-4 days depending on the urgency across highway N-50 and M-14, M-15 motorways crossing Rawalpindi, Islamabad and then moving on the N-35 highway popularly known as Karakoram Highway that passes through Abbottabad and Mansehra, overlooking Balakot.

The CTD’s claims that the car that was used for the bombing was brought to the spot after being purchased more than 1,200 km away and then driven for 3 days at least, even as it was loaded with explosives somewhere in between, is unlikely to make an impression on the Chinese, who are working on probing the attack as a part of a Joint Investigation Team that Beijing forced Islamabad to constitute.

There are numerous loopholes in the story, former TTP functionary, Ehsan Ullah Ehsan said while speaking to The Sunday Guardian.

According to him, the illegal parking charges are Rs 100 per day in Chaman and to expect someone to agree to pay Rs 500 per day will in itself raise suspicion of the petrol station workers, if in reality the car was parked at the petrol pump if one goes by CTD’s claims.

Secondly, multiple sources told The Sunday Guardian that such non custom paid cars are more easily and abundantly available in the areas of Swat, Sangla and Kohistan after being smuggled into Pakistan. All these purchasing points are much closer to Dasu dam project site than Chaman.

Sources who are dealing with transport and security officials at Chaman border said that it is true that for a car that is brought into Pakistan though the Chaman border, the market rate is .25 million Pakistani rupee and the CTD in its report merely quoted a figure that is prevalent in the area without doing any real investigation. This was also confirmed by Ehsanullah Ehsan.

According to Kabul based sources, since Chaman shares its border with Afghanistan, the whole narrative was being weaved in a way to put the Kabul government in the cross-hairs of Beijing. The narrative has further been strengthened by the CTD’s report in which it has also claimed that the perpetrators were Afghan citizens.

Sources, on the request of The Sunday Guardian reached out to multiple armed groups based in Af-Pak region, including the TTP and Taliban but could not find the details of any Hazrat Bilal, who the CTD had claimed was a TTP functionary and the mastermind of the attack.

The report prepared by the CTD, given the fact that it was a terror attack impacting Chinese interest, was vetted by officials of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

ISI Dossiers Full of Inaccuracies

The ISI, as past and recent records show, has a history of preparing and presenting dossiers that are filled with inaccuracies as a result of which now these dossiers are not taken at face value by counter-terrorism experts and officials including those who are associated with the United Nations.

Last year in November, the same CTD-KPK released a list of 152 most wanted terrorists of the region. The list also had the name of a prominent tribal journalist and author, Ihsanur Rehman Dawar, who is also a member of the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA). A bounty of Rs1 million was placed on his head for information leading to his arrest. In the list, the CTD had used his picture while incorrectly identifying him as Ihsanullah Khan. Similarly, multiple accredited social workers active in the region were named in the list.

In September 2021, the ISI and the Pakistan federal government, while addressing a press conference in Islamabad to challenge one of the reports filed by this newspaper that cited terror threat to the touring New Zealand cricket team, had claimed in front of hundreds of local and foreign journalists and shared dossiers with them that stated that a threat email was sent to New Zealand cricket Martin Guptil’s wife and local police by a device that was being used by an individual that the ISI sleuths identified as Om Prakash Mishra from Maharashtra. The dossier also contained the picture of Om Prakash Mishra.

However, the man who was accused of sending the email and whose picture was picked up by the bright minds working at ISI, Aabpara, was a rapper who had become viral and a meme material in 2017 for his song “Bol Naa Aunty aaun Kya…”

Similarly, in a recent dossier shared by the ISI with a United Kingdom-based newspaper, that the newspaper used in a story to claim that Indian intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) was killing terrorists in Pakistan, the dossier contained a picture of one Riyaz Ahmed, which the ISI and the newspaper claimed was of Riyaz Ahmed, a top Lashkar-e-Taiba commander who was killed by R&AW in September last year. However, in reality the picture was of a former Indian Army soldier who was arrested in February 2024 by the Delhi police for being an active operative of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

According to officials who have expertise in the security situation in Pakistan, one of the objectives of this whole exercise is to put the Kabul government on the backfoot by using the death of Chinese citizens.

Kabul and the Taliban officials running it have come under a lot of pressure from Islamabad, which accuses them of hosting and supporting the TTP. Last month, Islamabad carried out air strikes in Afghanistan in areas which it claimed were the residents of senior TTP commanders.

The Taliban government has categorically denied hosting the TTP commanders or supporting them, who mostly move in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan through the porous international borders between the two countries.

The death of the five Chinese workers is likely to force Beijing to ask Kabul to take stringent action against the TTP, which is exactly what Islamabad wants. Pakistan believes that given the massive investment that China is making in Afghanistan, Beijing will have more influence over the Taliban government.

In this backdrop, it cannot be ruled out, sources in Kabul said, that the attack on the bus was carried out by one of the many armed groups that work on the directions of the ISI.

The Chinese have now invested too much of resources and time in CPEC and hence do not have the option to move out of Pakistan and abandon their billion dollars’ worth investments, leaving Islamabad with various options on how to use Beijing’s power to establish its own strategic goals.

The fact that the region where the attack took place is also frequented by Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) and other multiple local armed groups including the Mujahideen Gilgit-Baltistan and Kohistan (MGB) and smaller religious extremist groups who abhor “foreign presence” in their neighbourhood was conveniently ignored by the CTD and the ISI.

After the attack, the Afghan deputy interior minister Mohammad Nabi Omari advised Pakistan and the TTP to resolve their issues through dialogue as the violence in Pakistan “is spreading to Afghanistan”. However, the proposal was promptly rejected by Islamabad.

(With Inputs From Agencies)