Baitullah Mehsud Death and Burial Location on Google Earth

Few months back the government of Pakistan and US both got exposed by the media when they released the pictures of US Drones parked in Shamsi airbase in Baluchistan. The controversy became an embarassment for both Musharraf and the present democratic government as no one could deny the reality. The detail article about the US drones parked in Pakistan can be found here.  Google Earth was credited for that discovery since its free service helped some curious users to discover the truth.

Google Earth has since been used to locate on map all places whose names are mentioned in media. Recently, when the death of Baitullah Mehsud was announced on the media, few people started finding the locations. The good news is that they were successful in locating the areas where Baitullah Mehsud is claimed to be killed and also the area where he had been buried. Thanks to Stefan Geens of Ogle Earth, the locations have now been tagged on Google Earth.

Since we all know and read that Baithullah Mehsud was hit by drones in Zangrai Algad (its Algada in reality which means a river or stream in Pashtu), Stefan was able to locate it.  According to Stefan,

Ladha was easily found via a default search in Google Earth (and the returned placemark comes courtesy of an entry in Google Earth Community); it is indeed in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan, and is the location of an old British fort. Then it was a matter of finding Zanghara. Here Geonames.org once again proved to be an invaluable resource. A fuzzy search for “Zangarha” in Pakistan returned one clear answer exactly 15km northeast of Ladha: Zangarai Algad, where “algad” denotes that the feature name is a stream or shallow valley. This valley extends northeast-southwest for a few kilometers, and I think it is likely this is the place referred to by the article.

You can further explore the area. Do note the terrain and anyone with slight idea of military will be in a better position to comment on it. As per my knowledge, the terrain is very difficult to access for any foot soldiers and hence drones are the best weapons to hit targets in such terrain.

Now lets see the second place where the Baitullah Mehsud is said to have been buried as per his will. The possible location has been shared in few media outlets as Nargosey. The place was also discovered by Stefan and that is what he says about it:

Browsing with Geonames.org in the immediate vicinity of the Zangarai placemark, it only took seconds to chance upon “Nargosa” village, one of the very few inhabited places in the remote and hilly area. Such successful triangulation of place names makes it quite likely in my mind that this is the place referred to

Thanks to the Google Earth, even individuals can now use their own free satellite to track things and make discoveries. Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch rightly says:

It is becoming increasingly more difficult to hide from Google Earth, which makes us all Big Brother in a sense. That’s a good thing (better us than a single government or corporation).

Unfortunately, Google Earth is only retrospective. You can’t see what is happening across the globe right now. Maybe one dayit will be closer to real time.

Let’s hope that the information provided by Google Earth is used for positive purposes since such vast information freely available can always be used for criminal and terrorist activities as well. So let’s hope the negative side of this technology is not much explored.

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Tagged as: Baitullah Mehsud, google earth, Nargosay, Pakistan, Taliban, Zangarai