Roadside bomb kills nine in Pakistan

Taliban faction says it was responsible for blast that hit van

PESHAWAR // At least nine people were killed when a roadside bomb targeted a minivan in Pakistan’s north-west tribal region yesterday, in an attack claimed by a breakaway Taliban faction.

The blast ripped through the van as it travelled through a minority Shiite 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. A woman and two children were among the nine killed in the explosion, which also injured 13.

With few adequate medical facilities in the area, a Pakistani army helicopter evacuated the wounded to a nearby military hospital.

A breakaway Taliban faction, Jamat-ul-Ahrar, said it was behind the attack. The Pakistani Taliban and other Sunni militant groups often target minority Shiites whom they consider to be heretics. ISIL has also claimed several recent attacks in the country.

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

Yesterday’s blast came as four members of the Pakistani Taliban were executed at a prison, the army said.

The four were convicted of involvement in attacks on civilians, police and troops by the country’s controversial military courts. Pakistan’s powerful army chief last week confirmed death sentences passed by military courts on 30 militants, some of whom were involved in the country’s worst extremist attack, in which Taliban gunmen killed more than 150 people, most of them children, in a raid on a school in the north- west city of Peshawar. The military courts – in which the army can try civilians on terror charges in secret, despite strong criticism from human rights groups – were established after the 2014 attack.

Also yesterday, paramilitary forces raided an apartment in the southern port city of Karachi after a tip-off that militants were hiding there, police officer Aurangzeb Khattak said.

After a seven-hour siege, three militants, including a woman, blew themselves up inside the apartment.

The explosion also killed a five-year-old while a fourth militant was killed trying to flee the scene.