Four Pakistanis helped Taliban ambush US chopper

The Taliban, helped by four Pakistanis, lured US forces into an elaborate trap to shoot down their helicopter in Afghanistan, killing 30 American troops in the deadliest such incident of the war, an Afghan official said on Monday. A total of 38 people – 30 US troops, many of them special forces, plus seven Afghan commandos and an interpreter – were killed when their Chinook came down during an anti-Taliban operation late on Friday.
The senior government official told AFP on condition of anonymity that a Taliban commander, Qari Tahir, lured US forces to the scene by tipping them off that a Taliban meeting was taking place, and added that four Pakistanis helped Tahir carry out the strike. “Now it’s confirmed that the helicopter was shot down and it was a trap that was set by a Taliban commander,” said the official, citing intelligence gathered from the area. “The Taliban knew which route the helicopter would take,” he added. “That’s the only route, so they took position on the either side of the valley on mountains and as the helicopter approached, they attacked it with rockets and other modern weapons. It was brought down by multiple shots,” he said.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to discuss the issue, also said Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s US-backed government “thinks” the attack was retaliation for the killing of Osama bin Laden. The Taliban themselves did not make such an assertion on claiming responsibility for the attack. When questioned about whether the attack was linked to a trap laid by a Taliban commander, the militia’s spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said: “We have used various tactics over the past 10 years. This could also be a tactic. The informant could have been one of our comrades.”