2023-08-31 20:53:01
At least nine people died this Thursday and another twenty were injured in a suicide attack against a military comboy in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in northern Pakistan.
“A suicide bomber on a motorcycle blew himself up in a military convoy in the general area of Jani Khel, Bannu district,” the Pakistani Army (ISPR) said in a statement.
As it turned out, nine soldiers were killed and five others were wounded, the authority added.
The police chief of the Jani Khel police station put the number of wounded in the attack at 20, adding that the Hafiz Gul Bahadur group, the active wing of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the main Pakistani group of the Taliban, took responsibility.
“According to our initial report, the Hafiz Gul Bahadur group has claimed responsibility for the attack,” the official told EFE.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in the country’s northwestern tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, was a Pakistani Taliban stronghold for years before authorities launched a heavy military offensive in the region in 2014.
Although the army claims the area has been cleared of insurgents, attacks on security force checkpoints and shootings have increased in recent years, especially since its ideological brethren Afghan seized control of Kabul in August 2021.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) group, an umbrella group for several Pakistani armed groups allied to the Afghan Taliban, announced last November the resumption of its armed activity after months of unsuccessful peace negotiations with the government.
Pakistan witnessed 271 militant attacks in the first half of this year, in which 389 people were killed and 656 others injured, according to a report released in early July by the Pakistan Institute for Security and Conflict Studies.
A significant increase in the figures compared to the same period in 2022, when Pakistan suffered 151 attacks that caused 293 deaths and 487 injuries. EFE
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