A suicide bombing has killed at least 12 people outside a judicial complex in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, officials said.
Interior minister Mohsin Naqvi told reporters an attacker tried to “enter the court premises” at about noon on Tuesday, at a time when they are usually packed with visitors attending hearings, and detonated his explosives near a police van. More than two dozen people were injured, Naqvi said.
The attack was a rare strike in the capital, which has remained largely insulated from the surging violence plaguing Pakistan’s western frontier with Afghanistan in recent months. “It’s not just another bombing. It happened in Islamabad,” the interior minister said.
Navqi did not blame any specific group for the blast, but Pakistani civilian defence minister Khawaja Asif suggested Afghanistan’s Taliban government was to blame.
“We are in a state of war,” Asif wrote in a post on social media site X on Tuesday afternoon. “The rulers of Kabul can stop terrorism in Pakistan, but bringing this war all the way to Islamabad is a message from Kabul, to which — praise be to God — Pakistan has the full strength to respond.”
The attack came amid tensions between Pakistan and neighbours Afghanistan and India, which Islamabad accuses of sponsoring and supporting militants in its territory. New Delhi and Kabul both deny any involvement in terrorism in Pakistan, and accuse Islamabad of using allegations of such involvement as a pretext to destabilise both nations.
A third round of peace talks between Pakistani and Afghan Taliban officials held in Istanbul collapsed last week.
The negotiations, brokered by Qatar and Turkey, began last month after Islamabad launched multiple air and drone strikes on Afghanistan, including against the capital of Kabul, and the Taliban responded with cross-border raids. Dozens of civilians and soldiers were killed before a ceasefire was announced.
This year, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Baloch separatist groups have killed more than 1,600 civilians and security forces, the highest death toll in a decade, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a database compiled by the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.
The Islamabad attack came a day after a car explosion in New Delhi that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi blamed on unnamed “conspirators”.
India and Pakistan fought a brief but fierce conflict in May after New Delhi accused Islamabad of involvement in a massacre in Kashmir. Pakistan denies the allegation.
(Financial Times)
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