Quetta: A suicide car bomber struck a school bus in southwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing five people, including at least three children, and wounding 38 others, officials said. It was the latest attack in the tense Balochistan province.
The province has been the scene of a long-running insurgency, with an array of separatist groups staging attacks, including the outlawed Balochistan Liberation Army, or BLA, designated as a terror group by the United States in 2019.
A local deputy commissioner, Yasir Iqbal, said the attack took place on the outskirts of the city of Khuzdar as the bus was transporting children to their military-run school there.
Troops quickly arrived at the scene and cordoned off the area while ambulances transported the victims to hospitals in the city. Local television stations aired footage of the badly damaged bus and scattered debris.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion is likely to fall on ethnic Baloch separatists, who frequently target security forces and civilians in the region.
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Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi strongly condemned the attack and expressed deep sorrow over the children’s deaths. He called the perpetrators “beasts” who deserve no leniency, saying the enemy had committed an act of “sheer barbarism by targeting innocent children.”
The military also issued a statement, saying the bombing was “yet another cowardly and ghastly attack” allegedly planned by neighbouring India and carried out by “its proxies in Balochistan.”
There was no immediate comment from New Delhi.
