Taliban 'behead' Polish engineer

PESHAWAR - The Taliban miscreants from Dara Adam Khel on Saturday claimed killing of abducted Polish engineer Piotr Stanczak kidnapped last year to pressure Islamabad to release detained insurgents.
A purported Taliban spokesman named Mohammad Saturday told the media on the telephone from an unknown place that they had assassinated Piotr Stanczak.
AFP adds: The spokesman for TTP told AFP by telephone that its men decapitated Piotr Stanczak early Saturday after the Pakistani government failed to meet the group's demands by a Friday midnight deadline.
No Pakistani government comment regarding the group's claim was immediately available, while Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said his country received 'informal confirmation' of the engineer's death.
A spokesman for the Polish embassy in Islamabad, Piotr Adamkiewicz told AFP: "We got the information of his death from different sources, we consider it is 99.99 per cent true, but we have no proof or official confirmation."
Stanczak was seized on September 28 by armed men who killed his two drivers and bodyguard in northwestern town of Attock, where he was working for a Polish energy company.
A few hours before the militants' deadline was due to expire, Tusk told media in Warsaw on Friday that "the Polish government never pays any ransom."
TTP is led by tribal warlord Baitullah Mehsud, and is also accused of having planned the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007.
"We held a meeting last evening (Friday) to consider it and the majority view was that there should be no more time given to negotiations," said TTP official Suhail Ahmed.
Mohammad later told AFP that the beheading was carried out early Saturday in South Waziristan, a notorious hub of Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants on the Afghan border.
"We had given a deadline to the government for Friday midnight which they failed to honour and we beheaded the Polish man," the spokesman said.
The Taliban said they would not hand over the body to the government and would release a video of Stanczak's beheading within four days.
Tusk insisted after the Taliban announcement that his government "used all political, operational, logistical means to prevent this tragedy," but failed.
Security officials said the negotiations broke down because the Taliban demanded the release of an Al-Qaeda militant known for his expertise in making explosive-packed 'suicide jackets'.
The Taliban originally demanded the release of 30 militants in Pakistani custody and then reduced it to a list of six, a security official involved in the negotiations told AFP.
Stanczak's last known location was near the Afghan border close to Kurram tribal district, the official said.
The Taliban said both Islamabad and Warsaw offered it a large amount of money in return for Polish man's release but it refused to accept that without the release of the prisoners.
It had also called for the end of suspected United States drone attacks against Taliban and Al-Qaeda targets in Pakistani tribal areas.
Stanczak's abduction on September 28, 2008 came one week after the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad which left at least 60 people dead, heightening concerns about instability in Pakistan, a key ally in the US "war on terror."
In October Stanczak appeared in a video appealing for the released of suspected Taliban militants jailed in Pakistan. He spoke in a calm voice with the barrels of two rifles pointed at him.
Several foreigners have been taken hostage in the region.