Suicide bomber kills 12 outside court in Pakistan

A suicide bomber has struck outside the gates of a district court in Islamabad, detonating his explosives next to a police car and killing 12 people, Pakistan’s interior minister said.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the midday blast, which also wounded at least 27 people, but authorities have struggled over the past months with a resurgent Pakistani Taliban.

Witnesses described scenes of mayhem in the immediate aftermath.

The explosion, which was heard for miles away, came at a busy time of day when the area outside the court is typically crowded with hundreds of visitors attending court hearings.

The attacker tried to “enter the court premises but, failing to do so, targeted a police vehicle”, interior minister Mohsin Naqvi told journalists. Earlier reports by Pakistani state-run media and two security officials said a car bomb had caused the explosion.

Mr Naqvi alleged that the attack was “carried out by Indian-backed elements and Afghan Taliban proxies” linked to the Pakistani Taliban.

The casualties were mostly passers-by or those who had arrived for court appointments, media reports said.

More than a dozen badly wounded people were screaming for help as ambulances rushed to the scene. “People started running in all directions,” said Mohammad Afzal, who said he was at the court when he heard the blast.

In an earlier development, Pakistani security forces said they foiled an attempt by militants to take cadets hostage at an army-run college overnight, when a suicide car bomber and five other attackers targeted the facility in a north-western province.

The authorities blamed the Pakistani Taliban, which is separate from but allied with Afghanistan’s Taliban, but the group denied involvement in that attack on Monday evening.

The attack started when a bomber tried to storm the cadet college in Wana, a city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province near the Afghan border. The area had until recent years served as a base for the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaida and other foreign militants.

According to Alamgir Mahsud, the local police chief, two of the militants were quickly killed by troops while three militants managed to enter the compound before being cornered in an administrative block. The army’s commandos were among the forces conducting a clearance operation and an intermittent exchange of fire went on into Tuesday, Mr Mahsud said.

The administrative block is away from the building housing hundreds of cadets and other staff.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif denounced both the attack in Islamabad and in Wana, and called in a statement issued in Islamabad for a full investigation.

He said those responsible must be brought to justice swiftly.

“We will ensure the perpetrators are apprehended and held accountable,” he said.

He described attacks on unarmed civilians as “reprehensible” and added: “We will not allow the blood of innocent Pakistanis to go to waste.”

The Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, have become emboldened since the Taliban seized power in Kabul in 2021, and many of the group’s leaders and fighters are believed to have taken refuge in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has seen a surge in militant attacks in recent years. The deadliest assault on a school occurred in 2014 when Taliban gunmen killed 154 people, mostly children, at an army-run school in Peshawar. According to the military, the assailants wanted to repeat on Monday what happened during the 2014 attack in Peshawar.