Pakistan blamed India for an alleged suicide attack on a school bus in its southwest province of Balutchistan on Wednesday morning which killed four children.
The bus was on the way to the public school in the city of the city of Khuzdar. According to local officials, an attacker led a vehicle on the bus, then exploded explosives.
Yash Dashti, Khuzdar assistant commissioner, said four children, the bus driver and a security guard were killed and that 12 other children were seriously injured. He said the initial investigation said it was a suicide bombardment.
Three of the children killed were appointed Hifsa Kausar, 12 ,, Esha Saleem, 16, and Sania Somroo, 12. Officials said the fourth child killed was still being identified
No militant group immediately claimed the responsibility of the attack. However, the media wing of the Pakistani army quickly published a declaration alleging that its neighbor and its rival of India had “planned and orchestrated” the attack.
“Indian terrorist proxys are used as a state tool of India to foment terrorism in Pakistan against soft targets such as innocent and civilian children,” the military statement said.
The accusation comes at a very volatile moment in Indian-Pakistani relations. Earlier this month, the two nuclear countries have come closest to the war for decades when they launched drones and missiles in the territory of the other, before a cease-fire was declared on May 10.
The trigger for the conflict was a militant attack on the cashmere administered by the Indians in April which killed 26 people. The Indian government accused militant groups supported by Pakistan of being behind the incident and launched targeted missile strikes such as “terrorist infrastructure and camps” above the border. Pakistan responded in dismissing missiles on Indian military targets.
In the aftermath of the ceasefire, the Indian government said that any future terrorist attack on its territory would be considered an act of war.
Pakistan denied any involvement in the militant attack last month at the Indian cashmere. He became more vocal by blaming India for an increasing wave of militant attacks that struck Pakistan, especially in the Balutchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa regions.
Pakistan has repeatedly accused India of using proxy militant groups to carry out terrorist attacks to destabilize the country.
In Balutchistan, which houses a bloody insurrection of several decades, the Balutchistan Liberation Army (Bla), a separatist militant group, was the source of an increasing number of incidents, including suicide bombardments and the recent diversion of a train. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which borders Afghanistan, the attacks by the Pakistani Taliban, known as TTP, were intensified recently.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif echoes the military by blaming India for Wednesday’s attack on the school bus. “Terrorists operating under the Indian patronage attacking innocent children on a school bus are clear proof of their hostility,” he said.
A spokesman for the Balutchistan government, Shahid Rind, denounced the attack as the “hideous face of terrorism sponsored by the Indian state”.
The attack echoes an incident more than a decade earlier when the TTP hit an army public school in the city of Peshawar, in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, killing more than 100 schoolchildren. It was one of the deadliest militant attacks against the children in the history of Pakistan.
