At least four children were killed and 38 others injured on Wednesday after a suicide car bomber targeted a school bus in the restive Khuzdar district of southwestern Pakistan’s Balochistan province, officials said.
Several of the injured are in critical condition, and the death toll is expected to rise.
The bus was ferrying children to a military-run school when it was struck, according to Khuzdar’s deputy commissioner Yasir Iqbal.
No group has claimed responsibility so far, but suspicion is likely to fall on ethnic Baloch separatist outfits, particularly the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), which has frequently attacked civilians and security forces in the province. The BLA was designated a terrorist organisation by the United States in 2019.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi condemned the attack in strong terms, saying: “The enemy committed sheer barbarism by targeting innocent children. Such beasts deserve no leniency.”
Wednesday’s bombing comes just days after a similar car explosion killed four people near a market in Qillah Abdullah, also in Balochistan. In March, BLA insurgents killed 33 people, mostly soldiers, in a deadly attack on a passenger train in the province.
While separatists in Balochistan typically target military or police personnel, attacks on school children—though rare in the province—have occurred in other regions, including the devastating 2014 Taliban attack on a military school in Peshawar that left 154 people dead, most of them children.
Source: Times of India
