source: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/05/20/1211182801784.html
Militants linked to al-Qaeda have set up training camps to teach
children how to conduct suicide attacks, say senior officers in the
Pakistani military.
The army said on Monday it had overrun one such camp in territory
where the notorious Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud
operates.
Militants had transformed a government-run school near the village of
Spinkai in South Waziristan into what one officer described as a
"nursery for preparing suicide bombers".
The school was part of a large compound above the village that
included a small mosque.
Major General Tariq Khan said: "It was like a factory that had been
recruiting nine- to 12-year-old boys and turning them into suicide
bombers."
He told the Dawn newspaper that at another location military
investigators found film footage on a DVD that they believed depicts
children at the school receiving suicide training.
The footage, which was shown to journalists, contained images of a
masked teacher instructing rows of school children who wore white
headbands inscribed with Koranic verses.
The teacher pointed at the blackboard while an armed guard stood
alongside and discussed what to carry in a suicide attack.
Major General Athar Abbas, the army's chief spokesman, said the school
and a hospital had been taken over by militants "to prepare children
for suicide attacks and for making IEDs [improvised explosive
devices]".
The general said that during operations in the area soldiers had
rounded up more than 50boys who had been undergoing suicide attack
training.
He said many of the boys had been kidnapped. Most were from the ethnic
Pashtun belt of the North West Frontier Province, although some were
locals from South Waziristan.
"The boys were handed to an NGO to be looked at," General Abbas said.
However, the fate of the boys was unknown on Monday, with local
organisations saying they had not received them.
Mehsud has emerged over the past year as Pakistan's most notorious
militant commander, blamed for a wave of suicide attacks across the
country, and has links with al-Qaeda.
Since January last year, there have been more than 80 suicide attacks
that have killed more than 1000 people in Pakistan. Many of the
suicide attacks in neighbouring Afghanistan - some re****ted to have
involved teenagers and even younger children - have originated on the
Pakistani side of the border.
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