Militants kill 61 in Pakistan police attack
Recruits gunned down in sleeping quarters
PAKISTAN yesterday mourned the killing of at least 61 people in a brutal gun and suicide bomb assault on a police academy, the deadliest attack on a security installation in the country’s history.
A total of 118 people were wounded in the attack.
Three masked gunmen burst into the sprawling academy in the southwest, pretending to be soldiers as they targeted sleeping quarters containing about 700 recruits in a strike that sent terrified young men fleeing.
“They knocked at the locked rooms and told the cadets that they were from the army, and when they opened the doors, they fired at them,” a 22-year-old cadet said from his hospital bed where he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the left shoulder.
“They came in by jumping over the walls of the academy which are very low. I ran away from my room and was hit by a bullet. I still managed to flee.”
The attack on the Balochistan Police College, 20km east of the provincial capital Quetta, began at 11.10pm on Monday, with gunfire continuing to ring out at the site for several hours.
Balochistan province Home Minister Sarfaraz Bugti said the attackers first killed a tower sentry before accessing the grounds.
Major-General Sher Afgan, chief of the paramilitary Frontier Corps in Balochistan which led the counter-operation, blamed the attack on the Pakistani Taliban-affiliated Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) militant group, and said the counter-strike was over in three hours.
An e-mailed claim from the Pakistani Taliban, which shares close operational ties with LeJ, backed that assertion.
“This was to avenge the killing of those of our Mujahideen who were killed indiscriminately [in fake encounters] outside jails in Punjab,” it said in an apparent reference to a surge in extrajudicial executions of LeJ fighters.
The Islamic State (IS) group also made a claim via Amaq, its affiliated news agency, and released a picture of what it said were the three attackers.
LeJ officially pledges allegiance to al-Qaeda, the IS group’s major rival. But the dual claims could be evidence of new linkages that remain unofficial, analysts say.
Pakistan’s top military and intelligence brass, including army chief Raheel Sharif, attended an official funeral ceremony for the victims, whose bodies were placed in coffins draped in white and borne by soldiers in dress uniform.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif later flew to Quetta to chair a high level security meeting.
It was the third deadliest attack of the year in Pakistan, which has been racked by a homegrown Islamist insurgency since shortly after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
The compound remained sealed to journalists but mobile video footage shot by an intelligence official showed the hollowed remains of a large dormitory hall covered in thick soot.
Weeping relatives were sent to the main hospital, where citizens rushed to donate blood.
Mineral-rich but impoverished Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province, is beset by sectarian strife, Islamist violence and an on-off separatist insurgency that has lasted for decades.
In August, a suicide bombing at a Quetta hospital claimed by the IS group and the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar faction of the Pakistani Taliban killed 73 people, including many of the city’s legal community which had gone there to mourn the fatal shooting of a colleague. – AFP