Blast kills widow of slain Pakistani journalist

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Hayatullah Khan

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The widow of Hayatullah Khan, a Pakistani journalist whose bullet-riddled body was found in June 2006 nearly seven months after his abduction in December 2005, died Saturday in a bomb blast outside her residence at Harmaz town in Mirali tehsil of troubled North Waziristan Agency near the country’s border with Afghanistan.

According to Ehsanullah, brother of Hayatullah Khan, a bomb that was planted with the boundary wall of the house went off early in the morning killing Mehrun Nisa, widow of Hayatullah Khan.

However, he added, five children of the slain journalist who were asleep in the same room survived miraculously.

"The same people who had kidnapped and then killed my brother are responsible for the attack," an aggrieved Ehsanullah said.

Local militants had condemned the killing of the journalist immediately after his body was found.

Hayatullah had gone missing in December 2005 after reporting that an Al-Qaeda leader, Abu Hamza Rabia, was killed by a US missile that had struck a house at Mirali.

However, the Pakistani government had claimed that occupants of the said house were killed when an explosive device they had stored in the house went off.

But Hayatullah had tried to prove through evidences that a missile fired by a US aircraft had hit the house.

Hayatullah, who reported for various publications, was the first journalist to photograph fragments at the destroyed house that appeared to be of a US missile.