PESHAWAR: The senior leader of a prominent religious party succumbed to his wounds while three others were found dead in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, officials confirmed a day after the Pakistani Taliban announced a temporary ceasefire with the federal government.
Maulana Mirza Jan, the president of the Wana chapter of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Pakistan Fazl (JUI-F) party, was shot by unidentified persons last Thursday. A close aide of the JUI-F party’s chief Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, Jan was receiving treatment at a hospital in Wana since then.
Separately, North Waziristan’s district administrator confirmed three bodies were found in the Mir Ali area on Tuesday morning, adding that they had been killed by “unknown miscreants.”
“A strong voice of the tribal areas who also fought for them at every front, president of the JUI-F’s Wana chapter who was injured a few days earlier in a firing incident, Maulana Mirza Jan, has passed away after succumbing to his wounds,” the JUI-F said in a statement.
Jan’s funeral prayers would be offered in Wana on Wednesday, June 19 at 09:00 a.m., the party added.
The development takes place a day after the Pakistani Taliban or the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) announced a three-day ceasefire with the government in Islamabad from June 17-19 for Eid Al-Adha.
The Pakistani Taliban are a separate group but a close ally of the Afghan Taliban. They have been emboldened since the Afghan Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.
In recent months, the Pakistani Taliban have claimed a number of attacks and are suspected by officials in several others, mainly in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province that borders Afghanistan.
Pakistan has witnessed a spike in militant violence in its two western provinces, KP and Balochistan, since the Pakistani Taliban called off their fragile, months-long truce with the government in November 2022.
Pakistan says Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers are giving shelter to TTP fighters across the unruly border. The Afghan Taliban government insists it doesn’t allow anyone to use Afghan soil for violence in any country.
