What is this incident???
Can anybody recap?
There is plenty more if you Google, but here is some information to recap:
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/world/asia/08islamabad.html?_r=0
Pakistani Army Chief Orders Video Inquiry
By JANE PERLEZ
Published: October 7, 2010
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan The chief of the Pakistani Army said Friday that he had ordered an inquiry into an Internet video that shows men in Pakistani military uniforms executing six young men in civilian clothes.
The army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, said in a statement that a military board would conduct the investigation to determine the authenticity of the five-and-a-half-minute video, which raised concerns about unlawful killings by Pakistani soldiers supported by the United States.
General Kayani appeared to take a tough stance on extrajudicial killings, saying in the statement that it is not expected of a professional army to engage in excesses against the people whom it is trying to guard against the scourge of terrorism.
Violations of army rules against extrajudicial killings, he said, will not be tolerated. The statement was released by the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.
The graphic video showing the six young men some of whom appeared to be teenagers, blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs was
initially dismissed by the army as a fake.
The American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, discussed the video with General Kayani a week ago, and afterward, the Pakistani military acknowledged that it knew about the video and that it was credible, an American official said.
The videos authenticity has not been formally determined by American officials, but retired American military officers and intelligence analysts said that it appeared to be authentic. Two retired senior Pakistani officers also said that they found the video credible. It was apparently taken in the Swat Valley, where the army opened an offensive against the Taliban last year.
The State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, described the images as horrifying when they first emerged last week.
American law requires that the United States cut off aid to foreign militaries that are found to have committed gross violations of human rights.
That law, known as the Leahy amendment, has been applied in the past to Indonesia and Colombia, but never to a country of such strategic importance to the United States as Pakistan.
The Pakistani military has received more than $10 billion from the United States since 2001 for its cooperation in fighting militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban based inside the country.
Senior Congressional staff members were briefed Thursday by State Department officials about reports of summary executions by the Pakistani military, the second such briefing in several months. At one point, a Congressional aide told a State Department official that the Obama administration was dragging its feet on pressing the Pakistani Army about the reported killings, according to a person present at the briefing.
The video, apparently taken covertly with a cellphone, shows the six young men being lined up near a building. A burst of gunfire erupts. The men crumple. Some groans are heard, and then a soldier moves in to shoot each body at short range.
The video has not been seen on Pakistani television or discussed in the countrys newspapers. The Ministry of Information Technology was ordered by the army to remove the video from some well-known Web sites, an American official said, but it remained available on other sites.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 8, 2010, on page A6 of the New York edition.
More here:
New Video Appears to Show Abuse of Prisoners by Pakistani Military - NYTimes.com
New Video Appears to Show Abuse of Prisoners by Pakistani Soldiers
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Graphic video posted on YouTube in May appears to show Pakistani soldiers beating prisoners in the countrys Swat Valley region.
Days after a Web video apparently showing members of Pakistans military executing prisoners came to light, another video has been discovered that appears to show soldiers beating suspected militants in Pakistans Swat Valley.
As my colleague Jane Perlez reported on Wednesday,
the execution video had already raised concerns among American officials worried about how Pakistans military has been conducting its battle against militants, with the financial support of the United States.
While American officials said that video appeared to be genuine, a spokesman for the Pakistani Army,
Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, initially told The Times that it had to be fake, since, No Pakistan Army soldier or officer has been involved in activity of this sort. But two retired Pakistani senior army officers said they believed that the video was credible.
The next day, pressed by American officials, Pakistans military acknowledged that the execution video was genuine, but portrayed the killings as an isolated episode.
On Friday, a person from the Swat Valley, who wanted to remain anonymous for safety concerns, told The Times that the newly discovered video of the prisoners being beaten, which was uploaded to YouTube in May, seemed to have been shot in Khawazakhela, north of the town of Mingora.
This video, which also appears to have been shot on the type of low-resolution camera commonly found in phones appears to show in graphic detail the beating and interrogation of a suspected militant.
As the beatings are administered, men dressed in Pakistani military uniforms can be heard asking the prisoner, Are you a Talib? Mixed in with other questions is some laughter and the suggestion Beat him so that he knows what beating is.
The men in uniform question the prisoner in a mix of Urdu and Pashtun, but speak among themselves in Punjabi.
Reports of human rights abuses by Pakistans military in the Swat Valley are not new. Last year, The Times reported from Mingora:
Two months after the Pakistani Army wrested control of the Swat Valley from Taliban militants,
a new campaign of fear has taken hold, with scores, perhaps hundreds, of bodies dumped on the streets in what human rights advocates and local residents say is the work of the military.
If the two Web video clips are authentic, they would appear to support the findings of a
report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which claimed that extrajudicial killings by the military are common in areas under military control.
The commission reported that
282 such killings had taken place in Pakistans Swat Valley since the countrys military officially ended a battle for control there in 2009. The human rights report also said other sorts of abuses were taking place and warned:
Terrorism must not be resorted to defeat terrorism. The focus of the government must be on bringing terrorists to justice through legal means, with guarantees of fair trial and due process. HRCP implores the government to ensure that the actions of security forces in the region are consistent with human rights standards.
The execution video has now been removed from the Facebook page where it was posted this week but much of the footage was included in this report by Al Jazeera on Thursday:
Alleged extrajudicial killings in Pakistan - YouTube
Last year, a military officer serving in the Swat Valley during a large-scale offensive against Taliban insurgents showed The Times photographs of suspected militants who had been executed while in custody. The officer, who insisted on anonymity, also said he had video, shot on his phone, that he did not want to share.
He claimed to have recorded images of the extrajudicial killings, which he called rampant, because he opposed them and was concerned that such practices would damage the armys struggle against militancy.
Another officer, who also wanted to remain anonymous, told The Times last year that he had refused to comply with an order from his superiors to execute a group of captives suspected of being Taliban militants.
