A militan video purports to show Taliban
fighters with a surface to -air missile,claiming
they used a similar one to shoot down a
Pakistani helicopter carrying diplomats.
The video ,obtained by The Associated
Press includes a message from the Pakistani
Taliban claiming they fired a missile
from a distanceof 3 kilometers to down the
helicopter Friday,
"The missile hit the tail "rotor" a written
message in Urdu says at the video's start.
The crash killed the ambassadors to Pakistan
from the Philippines and Norway and the wives
of the ambassadors from Malaysia and Indonesia,
as well as three Pakistani crew members .
Twelve passengers many of them diplomats,
were injured.
Military official could not immediately reached
Sunday Previously ,Pakistan said a technical
failure caused the crash and dismissed an
earlier Taliban claim as opportunistic
However ,the surface to air missile shown
in the video appeared real ,In the video, a
masked militant discusses the missile 's parts
,while another portion shows what appears to
be hand-drawn picture of how a missile can
stricke a helicopter 's tail rotor.
The video was released late Saturday via
militan websites and corresponded to other
message distributed by the Pakistani Taliban,
though the AP could not independently verify it
Militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan do have
access to surface to-air missiles,
Pakistani security forces have been battling
militants in the country 's northwestern tribal
regions bordering ,Afghanistan for the past
several years ,That fighting took on new urgency
after a Taliban attack in December on military
school killed 150 people ,many of them children
The helicopter's crash site Friday Naltar is several
hundred kilometers form the north Waziristan
tribal area ,where fighting recently has been
focused. AP
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