—– Condition of one minor said to be critical; police say around four kilogrammes of explosives used in attack
PESHAWAR: At least seven people, including four children were injured in an explosion on Peshawar’s Warsak road early on Tuesday, hospital and rescue officials said.
According to the details of the injured admitted in Lady Reading Hospital, eight-year-old Ihsanullah was said to be in a critical condition. The condition of the rest of the six injured was said to be stable. They were identified as six-year-old Shakirullah, 14-year-old Ahmed Zia, 17-year-old Javeed, 22-year-old Niamat, 23-year-old Yousaf, and 24-year-old Saad Ahmed.
Bilal Ahmad Faizi, the spokesman for emergency rescue services, said an improvised explosive device (IED) went off on a busy road in Peshawar at 9:10 a.m. He said five people, including four children, were injured. Warsak Superintendent Arshad Khan said the incident took place near Peshawar Public School. He added that around four kilogrammes of explosives were used in the IED, disguised as a “cemented block”.
The police official also said that an investigation into the blast is underway. When asked about the like-ly target of the attack, Khan said it would be “premature” to say who the target was.
Rescue services shifted the injured to nearby medical facilities and the area was cordoned off by secu-rity forces after the incident.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Peshawar’s police chief, Mohammad Ashfaq Anwar, told Reuters that there was no indication school children were the target of the attack.
The blast comes a little over a week after two civilians lost their lives while 10 others, including three security forces personnel, were injured in a suicide attack in Bannu’s Bakka Khel area, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), on November 27.
The military’s media wing added that on Nov 26, a “motorcycle borne suicide bomber, affiliated with Hafiz Gul Bahadur Group and later identified as an Afghan national”, targeted a security forces convoy in the Bakka Khel area of Bannu district.
“Resultantly, 2x innocent civilians embraced Shahadat, while 7x civilians and 3x soldiers got injured.”
A day later, on November 28, the head of the Afghan diplomatic mission in Pakistan was summoned by the Foreign Office (FO) and conveyed four demands including extradition of Hafiz Gul Bahadur, whose group carried out the recent terrorist attack in Bannu.
A day earlier, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Governor Ghulam Ali said that it was becoming harder to conduct political activities in parts of his province and Balochistan because of the prevailing security problems as the next general elections — scheduled on February 8 — approached closer.
“There is no doubt that the situation in some areas including Tank, Dera Ismail Khan, Lakki Marwat and Bannu is not favourable,” he told a private TV news channel during an interview when asked if the present security situation was unsuitable for political parties to stage rallies in K-P.
He added that a similar situation persisted in Balochistan.
Pakistan saw a relative lull in terrorist violence before the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in August 2021. Pakistan’s security establishment expected that after their ascendency, the Taliban would rein in the banned terrorist outfit, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
The TTP has been harboured by Afghan and Indian spy agencies on Afghanistan’s soil to destabilise Pakistan.
However, contrary to Pakistan’s expectations, the embarrassing exit of the US-led forces from Af-ghanistan emboldened the TTP and motivated the group to replicate the Afghan Taliban’s “stunning victory” over NATO. An Afghan Taliban-brokered peace tryst with the TTP soured quickly and the sem-blance of normalcy was shattered by an uptick in the terrorist outfit’s violence – particularly in K-P and Balochistan.
Pakistan has seen a 60% increase in terror incidents and a 500% rise in suicide bombings since the Tali-ban recaptured Kabul, claiming the lives of nearly 2,300 Pakistanis, according to official figures recently shared by caretaker premier Anwaarul Haq Kakar.
The K-P governor said in the interview that the general polls in the areas he had pointed out could be conducted but repeated that it was difficult to carry out political activities in these places. –Agencies
