On Quetta police college that left 60 cadets dead

Officials say instructions given from Afghanistan

ISLAMABAD: The Islamic State said on Tuesday its fighters were responsible for an attack on a police training centre in the Pakistani city of Quetta that killed 60 people and injured 120.

The Amaq news agency described the attack as a “threeman suicide raid”. The IS fighters fromthe group’skhorasanchapter “used machine guns and grenades, then blew up their explosive vests in the crowd,” it said.

Amaq posted a photo of the three fighters who purportedly carried out the attack. Before Amaq published the claim on social media, Maj Gen Sher Afghan, chief of the paramilitary Frontier Corps in Balochistan, told reporters the attack was carried out by the Al-alami faction of the banned Lashkar-e-jhangvi (LEJ).

Intercepted calls between the attackers and their handlers suggested there were “three militants who were getting instructions from Afghanistan,” he said.

In August, the IS had claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Quetta hospital that killed 73 people, most of them lawyers. However, that attack was also claimed by the Jamaat-ul-ahrar faction of Pakistani Taliban.

Hundreds of police cadets were at the centre when masked attackers stormed the compound on the outskirts of Quetta late on Monday. Some cadets were taken hostage during the raid, which lasted nearly five hours.

“Militants came directly into our barrack. They just barged in and started firing point blank. We started screaming and running around in the barrack,” one cadet who survived told the media.

Other cadets said they jumped out of windows or cowered under beds as the attackers hunted them down. Balochistan home minister Mir Sarfaraz Bugti said two attackers blew up themselves up and a third one was shot in the head by security forces. A Reuters photographer at the scene said authorities carried out the body of a teenage boy who they said was the attacker who was shot dead.