Bureau podcast interviews drone strike eyewitness
Photo: OCV Photo/Flickr Creative Commons
‘I saw a big balloon of dust. Then I heard a bang.’ In the latest edition of the Bureau’s drones podcast a man from Pakistan’s tribal region describes witnessing a drone strike in 2009 that he believes killed a senior al Qaeda commander.
The man, whose identity the Bureau is not revealing for safety reasons, explains in detail to Owen Bennett-Jones how he saw a car and its passengers attacked by CIA drones one winter’s day in South Waziristan, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
After the first missile hit, the car stopped and three men got out. ‘I could see they couldn’t walk properly – it looked like they were injured,’ the eyewitness said. Moments later, a second missile struck the men. The local man later learned that one of those he had seen attacked was a feared commander known locally as Asmaraykhan.
In the podcast Alice K Ross, who leads the Bureau’s drones team, explains how she compared key details from the eyewitness’s account to the Bureau’s database of drone strikes in Pakistan, and some of the research problems this posed. The Bureau believes that this strike matches key details of the penultimate strike of George Bush’s presidency, which took place on January 1 2009.
Ross and Bennett-Jones also discuss the Pentagon’s plans for the future of unmanned systems and other recent drones news.
