Tag Archives: Pakistan

Suicide Bomber kills at least 70 at Pakistan Hospital

First responders and volunteers transport an injured man away from the scene of a bomb blast outside a hospital in Quetta

By Gul Yousafzai

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) – A suicide bomber in Pakistan killed at least 70 people and wounded dozens more in an attack on mourners gathered at a hospital in Quetta, according to officials in the violence-plagued southwestern province of Baluchistan.

The bomber struck as more than 100 mourners, mostly lawyers and journalists, crowded into the emergency department to accompany the body of a prominent lawyer who had been shot and killed in the city earlier in the day, Faridullah, a journalist who was among the wounded, told Reuters.

Abdul Rehman Miankhel, a senior official at the government-run Civil Hospital, where the explosion occurred, told reporters that at least 63 people had been killed, with more than 112 wounded, as the casualty toll spiked from initial estimates.

“There are many wounded, so the death toll could rise,” said Rehmat Saleh Baloch, the provincial health minister.

Television footage showed scenes of chaos, with panicked people fleeing through debris as smoke filled the hospital corridors.

The motive behind the attack was unclear and no group had yet claimed responsibility, but several lawyers have been targeted during a recent spate of killings in Quetta.

The latest victim, Bilal Anwar Kasi, was shot and killed while on his way to the city’s main court complex, senior police official Nadeem Shah told Reuters. He was the president of Baluchistan Bar Association.

The subsequent suicide attack appeared to target his mourners, Anwar ul Haq Kakar, a spokesman for the Baluchistan government, said.

“It seems it was a pre-planned attack,” he said.

Police cordoned off the hospital following the blast.

Aside from a long-running separatist insurgency, and sectarian tensions, Baluchistan also suffers from rising crime.

In January, a suicide bomber killed 15 people outside a polio eradication center in an attack claimed by both the Pakistani Taliban and Jundullah, another Islamist militant group that has pledged allegience to Islamic State in the Middle East.

Quetta has also long been regarded as a base for the Afghan Taliban, whose leadership has regularly held meetings there in the past.

In May, Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed by a U.S. drone strike while traveling to Quetta from the Pakistan-Iran border.

(Writing by Asad Hashim; Editing by Paul Tait and Simon Cameron-Moore)

Killings, Kidnappings and burnout; the hazards of aid work

Red Cross workers assist a collapsed migrant after he crossed Greece's border with Macedonia, in

By Katie Nguyen

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – You’re an aid worker speeding back to base after a long, cold day questioning people who have fled fighting about what they need to survive. Out of nowhere a girl runs into the road and is knocked over by your driver.

Within minutes, your four-wheel drive is surrounded by bystanders. First they shout, then they start banging windows and rocking the vehicle. Before long they prise open the car door and pull your driver out. Some are armed. What do you do?

It’s perhaps the toughest dilemma aid workers face during their brief stint in war-torn “Badistan” – in reality, a training camp in the grounds of a golf course near Gatwick Airport where they are confronted with mass casualties, a minefield and gun battles in various role-play scenarios.

The three-day course run by security risk management company, International Location Safety (ILS), is one of scores aimed at mitigating the risks of working in the field where aid staff kidnappings have quadrupled since 2002.

The perils of the job came under scrutiny in November when a court in Oslo found the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) guilty of gross negligence and awarded damages to a former employee abducted by gunmen from a Kenyan refugee camp in 2012.

It was the first case of its kind to reach a court judgment, igniting debate over whether aid agencies would become more risk-averse as a result.

“There has been an increasing bunkerisation of aid workers who operate out of compounds and are restricted in where they go,” said ILS Managing Director George Shaw.

“It does worry me that it will continue to happen. But that would be a lack of understanding of what the (NRC) ruling means. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do high-risk programs. It means we should do high-risk programs safely.”

NO SUCH THING AS RISK-FREE

Michael O’Neill, a former director of global safety and security at Save the Children International and now deputy chair of INSSA, an international NGO safety and security group, said the NRC case made it clear that organizations could do better.

“It’s not enough just to write (a security risk management system) down on paper. It’s not enough just to say it’s there,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “If it can happen to NRC, then who among us is not vulnerable at some level?”

Convening the first World Humanitarian Summit on the biggest issues facing the delivery of relief, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on warring parties to respect and protect aid workers, as well as the wounded and sick, from attack.

The summit in Istanbul later this month comes as leading aid officials warn of ever-increasing humanitarian needs due to crises ranging from Syria’s conflict to climate change.

The year 2013 was the worst for aid workers with 460 killed, kidnapped or seriously wounded, according to Humanitarian Outcomes which has collected data on the topic since 1997.

Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and Syria have gained a reputation for being most dangerous for aid workers, with the majority of attacks over the past decade or so occurring there.

Afghanistan alone accounted for 27 percent of those attacks between 2005 and 2014. But Somalia, with fewer aid workers, has seen an even higher rate of violence against humanitarians.

National staff are by far the most vulnerable. In 2014, they accounted for 90 percent of victims, roughly in proportion to their numbers in the field, Humanitarian Outcomes said.

REDUCING THE THREATS

Few believe all risks can be eliminated, but many agree that one of the most important ways to lessen them is to get the support of locals.

Too often aid workers are targeted because they are no longer perceived to be neutral. Wouter Kok, a security adviser for Medecins Sans Frontieres, said assuring all sides in a conflict of the agency’s impartiality is key to its security approach.

“We have to get back to that independence,” said Kok, who works for the Dutch arm of the medical charity.

“What we’ve seen in the last 10 to 20 years is that belligerents have tried to use humanitarian aid to win hearts and minds, and sometimes organizations have allowed themselves to be used,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Understanding the nuances of a conflict, the local culture and people’s motivations, together with strong negotiating skills, are also critical to mitigating risks, experts said.

Big organizations are increasingly aware that aid programs need to be designed with security in mind, INSSA’s O’Neill said. “Good programming and good security go hand in hand.”

For example, poorly designed food distributions can quickly turn ugly. But seeking the input of local communities, giving people a clear idea of what they will receive and setting up a complaints table away from the lines are some ways to reduce the risk, he said.

Caring for the mental health of aid workers is an overlooked but crucial aspect of keeping them safe, said Sara Pantuliano, director of humanitarian programs at the London-based Overseas Development Institute.

“The one thing that is forgotten the most is the levels of stress and trauma aid workers experience, and that is particularly true for local staff because they often have family affected by this crisis,” Pantuliano said.

“I think people don’t even raise the issue of being under stress or the threat of burning out or needing a proper break, needing to recuperate, because they may be accused of not being fit for the job,” she added.

For more on the World Humanitarian Summit, please visit: http://news.trust.org/spotlight/reshape-aid

(Reporting by Katie Nguyen; editing by Megan Rowling and Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Pakistan, Indonesia lead in malware attacks

An illustration picture shows a projection of text on the face of a woman in Berlin

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Pakistan, Indonesia, the Palestinian territories, Bangladesh, and Nepal attract the highest rates of attempted malware attacks, according to Microsoft Corp.

Countries that attracted the fewest include Japan, Finland, Norway and Sweden, Microsoft said in a new study, based on sensors in systems running Microsoft anti-malware software.

“We look at north of 10 million attacks on identities every day,” said Microsoft manager Alex Weinert, although attacks do not always succeed.

About half of all attacks originate in Asia and one-fifth in Latin America.

Millions occur each year when the attacker has valid credentials, Microsoft said, meaning the attacker knows a user’s login and password. A technology known as machine learning can often detect those attacks by looking for data points such as whether the location of the user is familiar.

On average, 240 days elapse between a security breach in a computer system and detection of that breach, said Tim Rains, director of security at Microsoft. The study, Microsoft Security Intelligence report, comes out Thursday.

(This story corrects headline to Indonesia, not India)

(Reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by David Gregorio)

Strong earthquake in Pakistan leaves six dead

By Asad Hashim

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Six people were killed across northern Pakistan although there appeared to be no widespread damage after a strong earthquake rattled major cities across South Asia at the weekend, authorities said on Monday.

The 6.6-magnitude quake on Sunday startled residents in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and forced some in high-rise buildings to flee into the streets of the Indian capital, New Delhi.

It was also felt in Islamabad and in Lahore in Pakistan’s east, about 630 km (390 miles) from the quake’s epicenter in remote northeastern Afghanistan, just inside the border with Tajikistan and across a narrow finger of land from Chitral – a district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan’s northwest.

Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said five people were killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Another was killed in northern Gilgit-Baltistan state, the NDMA said. At least seven people were reported injured across Pakistan, many of them in the northwestern frontier city of Peshawar.

There were no immediate reports of widespread damage in either Afghanistan or India, despite the quake rattling buildings in all three countries for more than a minute.

The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at a depth of about 210 km (130 miles).

Despite its depth, the quake still caused widespread panic in areas such as Chitral, a Reuters witness and a villager in the area said.

“It was a very dangerous situation, because our houses were already damaged from recent rainfall,” said Isa Khan, whose home in the village of Susoom, about 25 km (15 miles) north of Chitral, suffered moderate damage.

Most of the homes in his village are made of mud and brick. “We saw a lot of walls being damaged in front of us,” Khan said.

Pakistan’s NDMA said in a statement the air force had been asked to conduct an aerial photography survey to assess the damage in mountainous Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Khan said Chitral residents were still awaiting compensation after a 7.5-magnitude quake hit the area on Oct. 26 last year, killing more than 300 people and destroying thousands of homes.

The Hindu Kush area between Pakistan and Afghanistan is seismically active, with quakes often felt across a region where the Indian and Eurasian continental plates collide.

Just over a decade ago, a 7.6-magnitude quake in another part of northern Pakistan killed about 75,000 people.

(Additional reporting by Gul Hammad Farooqi in CHITRAL and Jibran Ahmed in PESHAWAR; Editing by Paul Tait and Himani Sarkar)

Floods kill At least 55 in Pakistan

Residents use a bridge covered with floodwater after heavy rain in Nowshera District on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan

By Asad Hashim

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Flash floods triggered by heavy rain in Pakistan have killed at least 55 people and rescuers were trying on Monday to help thousands of survivors including some cut off by a landslide in a mountain valley, officials said.

The weather system that brought the unusually heavy rain was expected to move northeast, towards northern India, although more isolated storms were expected in northern Pakistan, the Meteorological Department said.

Yousuf Zia, a disaster management official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said nearly 150 homes had been destroyed and tents and blankets were being distributed to the homeless.

“There are 30 people stranded by a landslide in the Kohistan Valley where we have sent a helicopter to rescue them,” Zia said.

Forty-seven people were killed and 37 injured in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Zia said, while eight people were killed in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, officials there said.

Landslides caused widespread damage to roads and communication infrastructure in the Pakistani side of Kashmir, they said.

One of the worst-affected districts was the Swat Valley, northwest of the capital, Islamabad, where 121 mm (4.76 inches) of rain fell on Sunday, the Meteorological Department said.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar claims responsibility for Easter bombing in Pakistan

Pakistan Blast

PESHAWAR, Pakistan/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – The Taliban faction that killed at least 70 people, many of them children, in a park in Lahore on Easter Sunday has been quickly gaining attention in militant circles.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar’s recent rise to prominence – Sunday’s attack was the fifth it has claimed since December – plus its onetime pledge of allegiance to Islamic State show the fractured and sometimes competitive nature of Pakistan’s myriad militants.

“They are nowadays the main group claiming attacks in the past few months,” said Mansour Khan Mehsud, lead researcher of the FATA Research Group, said of Jamaat-ur-Ahrar.

In Sunday’s attack, 29 of the 70 killed were children enjoying an Easter weekend outing. Pakistan is a majority Muslim state but has some two million Christians, and Easter is a public holiday.

It was the most deadly attack in Pakistan since the December 2014 massacre by the Taliban of 134 school children at a military run academy in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

A spokesman for Jamaat-ur-Ahrar (JA) on Monday threatened other attacks, including more against religious minorities.

“We don’t target women and children, but Islam allows us to kill men of the Christian community who are against our religion,” spokesman Ehansullah Ehsan said.

The group’s leader, Omar Khalid Khorasani, has a background that reads like a history of Pakistani militancy.

Born Abdul Wali in a small village called Lakaro in the northwestern Mohmand tribal region, Khorasani started out as an anti-India jihadist fighting in Kashmir, according to a long-time friend and militant colleague who spoke on condition of anonymity.

He later joined the Pakistani Taliban in 2007 to fight the government to establish strict sharia Islamic law.

In 2013, Khorasani was one of the candidates to lead the Pakistani Taliban – who are separate from but loosely allied with the Afghan Taliban – after its chief Hakimullah Mehsud was killed in a U.S. drone strike.

After losing out to Maulana Fazlullah, Khorasani left the next year to form his own group.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar in September 2014 swore allegiance to Islamic State, also known as Daesh.

“We respect them. If they ask us for help, we will look into it and decide,” spokesman Ehsan told Reuters of Islamic State, while rejecting the main Pakistani Taliban leadership.

By March 2015, however, the group was again swearing loyalty to the main Pakistani Taliban umbrella leadership. The reason for its return to the fold remains murky, but JA never specifically disavowed Islamic State either.

Khorasani was seriously wounded in a NATO air strike in eastern Afghanistan last year, Ehsan confirmed, but said he has fully recovered and is in hiding. Like many Pakistani militants, Jamaat-ur-Ahrar’s fighters sometimes flee into Afghanistan to escape a Pakistani army crackdown along the border that began in 2014.

Pakistani authorities have expressed fears that the ideology of the Middle East-based Islamic State – which places greater emphasis on killing Christians and minority Shia Muslims – could intensify sectarian violence in Pakistan.

Targeting minorities is not-uncommon among Pakistan’s predominantly Sunni Muslim militants, but it is a far more pronounced trait of Islamic State.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar had previously targeted Christians – in March 2015, it claimed two church bombings in Lahore that killed 14 people – but researcher Mehsud said he doubted JA’s loose affiliation to Islamic State was the cause.

Pakistan has been plagued by militant violence for the last 15 years, since it joined a U.S.-led campaign against Islamist militancy after the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

While the army, police, government and Western interests have been the prime targets of the Pakistani Taliban and their allies, Christians and other religious minorities have also been attacked by various factions.

Nearly 80 people were killed in a suicide bomb attack on a church in the northwestern city of Peshawar in 2013.

JA is vying for attention in the militant-saturated northwest that has some 60-70 armed Islamist groups, researcher Mehsud said.

“They target Christians and other minorities because it will get media attention … this is not something new,” he said. “They want to strike fear and show that they are still here and the military has not defeated the Taliban.”

(Additional reporting by Asad Hashim and Mubasher Bukhari; Writing by Kay Johnson; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)

Pakistani university reopens after Taliban attack, teachers allowed guns

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) – The university in northwest Pakistan where Taliban gunmen killed at least 20 people last month reopened for classes on Monday with teachers – but not students – allowed to carry weapons.

Pakistani Taliban militants have threatened more assaults on schools and universities since the Jan. 20 attack on Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, fueling a growing sense of insecurity in the country.

The attack had reminded Pakistanis of the horrors that took place a little over a year earlier, when militants massacred 134 pupils at an army school just 19 miles away, in Peshawar, the main city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Before Monday’s reopening the university took extra security measures, installing new CCTV cameras, hiring more armed guards, and raising the height of boundary walls, vice chancellor Fazal Rahim Marwat told Reuters.

The university also decided that teachers could continue to carry their own licensed weapons as long as they do not display them in classrooms, Marwat said.

A chemistry professor who was killed during last month’s assault had been lauded as a hero for firing back at the attackers. But Marwat said the school decided to reject a request from some teachers to issue them firearms.

“After taking whatever security measures were possible for protection of students and faculty members, we opened the university today for classes‎,” Marwat said.

Students who owned weapons had to submit them at the entrance of the campus, he said.

Firearms are easily available in northwest Pakistan, and gun ownership is ingrained in the culture of Pashtun tribes of the region.

Many of the returning students arrived at the campus with their parents and relatives, who waited while they went to classes. Several, however, were still too traumatized to attend school or were made to stay home by scared parents.

“I know the university has been opened today, but my parents didn’t allow me to go today,” said student Ihsanullah Khan. “I am not afraid and will definitely join my friends very soon.”

Vice chancellor Marwat said the university had arranged counseling sessions for students and for recreational trips elsewhere in the country.

The Pakistani army said the attack on the university was masterminded by Umar Mansoor, a Pakistani Taliban militant based in Afghanistan, who was also blamed for the Peshawar school massacre.

The Pakistani Taliban are fighting to topple the government and install a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

On Monday, an IED blast in Pakistan’s volatile South Waziristan region on the border with Afghanistan left one paramilitary soldier dead and three injured.

(Reporting by Jibran Ahmad and Hafiz Wazir; Writing by Mehreen Zahra-Malik; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Pakistan attack raises tough question: Should teachers shoot back?

CHARSADDA, Pakistan/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Stuck with 15 of his students on a third floor balcony of a campus building as gunmen came up the stairs, university director Mohammad Shakil urged Pakistani police arriving at the scene to toss him up a gun so he could shoot back.

“We were hiding … but were unarmed,” Shakil told Reuters, speaking after four Islamist militants attacked Bacha Khan University in Pakistan’s troubled northwest on Wednesday, killing more than 20 people.

“I was worried about the students, and then one of the militants came after us,” Shakil added. “After repeated requests, the police threw me a pistol and I fired some shots at the terrorists.”

As more details of Wednesday’s assault emerged, attention focused on at least two members of staff who took up arms to resist attackers bent on killing them and their students.

Some hailed them as heroes, as the country digested an attack which bore similarities to the massacre, in late 2014, of 134 pupils at an army-run school in Peshawar, about 19 miles from where this week’s violence occurred.

Others questioned whether teachers should be armed, as many are, because it goes against the ideals of the profession.

Such a dilemma may have been far from the mind of chemistry professor Hamid Hussain, as he locked himself inside a room with colleagues after gunmen stormed an accommodation block on the university campus.

When the assailants broke down the door, Hussain fired several rounds from his pistol, according to Shabir Ahmad Khan, an English department lecturer taking cover in an adjacent washroom.

“They carried on heavy shooting and I was preparing myself for death, but then they did not enter the washroom and left,” Khan recalled.

Later on in the same building, Hussain fired again at the militants to allow some of his students to get away, surviving pupils told local media. Hussain was subsequently shot and later died from his wounds.

“Kudos to professor Dr Hamid Hussain. Our hero fought bravely n saved many,” Asma Shirazi, a popular talk show host, said on Twitter.

TEACHERS’ DILEMMA

Others, too, have credited the actions of Hussain and Shakil with helping to prevent the gunmen, armed with assault rifles and hand grenades, from spilling more blood.

Bacha Khan University also employed around 50 of its own guards who, witnesses said, fought for close to an hour to keep the gunmen isolated and prevent them from entering the girl’s hostel as the police and army arrived.

Pakistan army spokesman General Asim Bajwa said the security guards responded “very well” to the attack before reinforcements reached them.

In the wake of the 2014 school massacre, teachers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where Peshawar is located, were offered weapons training. Yet some are wary of arming teachers and encouraging them to engage in battle.

Gun ownership is common in Pakistan, owing to liberal licensing laws, and particularly so in the semi-autonomous tribal belt near the Afghan border where the threat of militant violence is high.

Jamil Chitrali, president of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa University Teaching Staff Association, said more teachers were now carrying personal weapons, as security had worsened.

“Arms are against the norms of my profession,” he said. “I am teaching principles and morality in the class. How I can carry a gun?”

WHO IS TO BLAME?

Four gunmen, all since killed, were involved in Wednesday’s attack, officials said. They used the cover of thick fog to scale the campus’ rear walls, before storming student dormitories and classrooms and executing people at will.

Some 3,000 students were enrolled at the university, many living on campus, while hundreds of visitors had arrived to hear a poetry recital to commemorate the life of local Pashtun nationalist hero and pacifist Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, after whom the university is named.

The provincial government declared a day of mourning on Thursday as grieving families buried their dead and survivors recalled their ordeal.

Who was to blame remains a mystery. A senior commander of the Pakistan Taliban, Umar Mansoor, on Wednesday claimed responsibility, but an official spokesman for the group later denied involvement, calling the attack “un-Islamic”.

The hardline Islamist movement was believed to be behind the school massacre just over a year ago, and educational institutions are an increasingly common target for militants wanting to frighten the public.

Pakistan has killed and arrested hundreds of suspected Taliban militants in the last year under a major crackdown against a group fighting to overthrow the government and install a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

The army said on Thursday the attack in Charsadda, near Peshawar, was coordinated from across the border inside Afghanistan, according to its investigations.

Army chief General Raheel Sharif has called Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and the U.S. commander of international forces in Afghanistan to ask their help in locating those it holds responsible for the assault, army spokesman Bajwa said on Twitter.

(Editing by Mike Collett-White)

Militants storm Pakistan university, death toll rises

CHARSADDA, Pakistan/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Armed militants stormed a university in volatile northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing at least 20 people and wounding dozens a little more than a year after the massacre of 134 students at a school in the area, officials said.

A senior Pakistani Taliban commander claimed responsibility for the assault in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, but an official spokesman later denied involvement, calling the attack “un-Islamic”.

The violence nevertheless shows that militants retain the ability to launch attacks, despite a country-wide anti-terrorism crackdown and a military campaign against their strongholds along the lawless border with Afghanistan.

A security official said the death toll could rise to as high as 40 at Bacha Khan University in the city of Charsadda. The army said it had concluded operations to clear the campus six hours after the attack began, and that four gunmen were dead.

A spokesman for rescue workers, Bilal Ahmad Faizi, said 19 bodies had been recovered including students, guards, policemen and at least one teacher, named by media as chemistry professor Syed Hamid Husain. Husain reportedly shot back at the gunmen with a pistol to allow his students to flee.

Many of the dead were apparently shot in the head execution-style, TV footage showed.

The militants, using the cover of thick, wintry fog, scaled the walls of the university on Wednesday morning before entering buildings and opening fire on students and teachers in classrooms and hostels, police said.

Students told media they saw several young men wielding AK-47 guns storming the university housing where many students were sleeping.

“They came from behind and there was a big commotion,” an unnamed male student told a news channel from a hospital bed in Charsadda’s District Hospital. “We were told by teachers to leave immediately. Some people hid in bathrooms.”

Thirty five of the wounded remain in hospital, a local police official said late on Wednesday.

CONTRADICTING CLAIMS

The gunmen attacked as the university prepared to host a poetry recital on Wednesday afternoon to commemorate the death anniversary of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a popular ethnic Pashtun independence activist after whom the university is named.

Vice Chancellor Fazal Rahim told reporters that the university teaches over 3,000 students and was hosting an additional 600 visitors for the poetry recital.

Umar Mansoor, a senior Pakistani Taliban commander involved in the December 2014 attack on the army school in Peshawar, claimed responsibility for the Charsadda assault and said it involved four of his men.

He told Reuters by telephone the university was targeted because it was a government institution that supported the army.

However, later in the day, official Taliban spokesman Muhammad Khorasani issued a written statement disassociating the militants from the attack, calling it un-Islamic.

“Youth who are studying in non-military institutions, we consider them as builders of the future nation and we consider their safety and protection our duty,” the statement said.

The reason for the conflicting claims was not immediately clear. While the Taliban leadership is fractured, Mansoor is believed to remain loyal to central leader Mullah Fazlullah.

The Pakistani Taliban are fighting to topple the government and install a strict interpretation of Islamic law. They are loosely allied with the Afghan Taliban who ruled most of Afghanistan until they were overthrown by U.S.-backed military action in 2001.

By afternoon on Wednesday, the military said all four gunmen had been killed.

“The operation is over and the university has been cleared,” Pakistan army spokesman General Asim Bajwa said.

A security official close to the operation said he had seen the four gunmen’s bodies riddled with bullets. He said none of the gunmen was wearing a suicide vest, but they carried guns and grenades.

RUMORS OF ATTACK

Television footage showed military vehicles packed with soldiers driving into the campus as helicopters buzzed overhead and ambulances lined up outside the main gate while anxious parents consoled each other.

Shabir Khan, a lecturer in the English department, said he was about to leave his university housing for the department when firing began.

“Most of the students and staff were in classes when the firing began,” Khan said.

Several schools had closed early at the weekend around Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, after rumors circulated of a possible attack.

The area has been on edge since the December 2014 massacre by six gunmen in Peshawar.

Pakistan, which has suffered from years of jihadist militant violence, has killed and arrested hundreds of suspected militants under a major crackdown launched afterwards.

The Peshawar school attack was seen as having hardened Pakistan’s resolve to fight militants along its lawless border with Afghanistan.

“We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland,” Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in a statement after Wednesday’s attack.

(Additional reporting by Saud Mehsud. Writing by Tommy Wilkes and Kay Johnson; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Suicide bomber kills at least 15 outside Pakistan polio center

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) – A suicide bomber killed at least 15 people, most of them police, outside a polio eradication center in the Pakistani city of Quetta on Wednesday, the latest militant attack on the anti-polio campaign in the country.

Two militant groups – the Pakistani Taliban and Jundullah, which has links with the Taliban and has pledged allegiance to Islamic State – separately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The bomb blew up a police van that had just arrived at the center to provide an escort for workers in a drive to immunize all children under five years old in the poor southwestern province of Baluchistan.

“It was a suicide blast, we have gathered evidence from the scene,” Ahsan Mehboob, the provincial police chief told Reuters.

“The police team had arrived to escort teams for the polio campaign.”

Ahmed Marwat, who identified himself as a commander and spokesman for Jundullah, said his group was responsible.

“We claim the bomb blast on the polio office. In the coming days, we will make more attacks on polio vaccination offices and polio workers,” he said by telephone.

The Pakistani Taliban also claimed responsibility in a statement released by their spokesman, Mohammad Khorasani.

Teams in Pakistan working to immunize children against the virus are often targeted by Taliban and other militant groups, who say the campaign is a cover for Western spies, or accuse workers of distributing drugs designed to sterilize children.

The latest attack killed at least 12 policemen, one paramilitary officer and two civilians, officials said. Twenty-five people were wounded.

Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio remains endemic, the World Health Organization says.

The campaign to eradicate the virus in Pakistan has had some recent success, with new cases down last year, but violence against vaccination workers has slowed the effort.

(Reporting by Gul Yousafzai and Syed Raza Hassan; Additional reporting by Saud Mehsud in Dera Ismail Khan and Jibran Ahmed in Peshawar; Writing by Tommy Wilkes; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore, Robert Birsel)