Pak Taliban target Shias in roadside blast, 14 killed

Attack in remote tribal belt area near Afghanistan border

A ROADSIDE bomb targeting a minivan in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region on Tuesday killed 14 people, a local official said, raising an earlier reported death toll of nine killed. The attack was claimed by a breakaway Taliban faction.

The blast ripped through the van travelling through a minority Shia region of the Kurram tribal area, which borders Afghanistan, said Arif Khan, a tribal administration official in the town of Parachinar. The area has long been the scene of sectarian violence.

Five women and four children were among the 14 killed, while 10 people were wounded in the explosion. With few adequate medical facilities in the area, a Pakistani army helicopter evacuated the wounded to a nearby military hospital.

A spokesman for the Jamaatur-ahrar, a faction of the Islamist militant Pakistani Taliban group, said the explosive device had been intended to target the country’s Shia minority and workers in the area carrying out a census.

“Our target was the Shia community and census team in the area,” said Asad Mansur, the spokesman.

The military’s media wing, Inter Services Public Relations, said a special Mi-17 helicopter has been sent to Kurram Agency headquarters Parachinar to bring the injured to Peshawar for treatment. Security personnel rushed to the blast site and cordoned off the entire area. A search operation was also conducted.

Pakistani Taliban and other Sunni militant groups often target minority Shias whom they consider to be heretics. The Islamic State group has also claimed several recent attacks in the country.

For over a decade, Pakistan has been fighting Islamic militants who have killed tens of thousands of people. Islamabad has also undertaken several large-scale offensives in the tribal regions in an effort to rout militants from the area.

Last month, at least 28 people were killed and 100 others wounded when a suicide bomber detonated a car “rigged with explosives” outside a Shia imambargah in a busy market in Parachinar. The grisly violence had sparked angry protests by residents in Parachinar, the administrative headquarters of the agency, which is prone to sectarian violence.