Explosions of munitions due to a short circuit Monday in a Pakistani counter-terrorism police station left at least 12 dead and 50 injured, according to authorities who had initially mentioned a bomb attack.
The explosions “inside the police station” in Kabal, a town in the Swat Valley (northwest), caused “the total collapse of the building”, according to Khalid Sohail, a police officer from the local department of counter-terrorism.
Swat police chief Shafi Ullah Gandapur told reporters the blasts were caused by a short circuit in a basement containing “grenades and other explosives”.
“There is no indication that they were caused by an external attack or suicide bombers,” he added.
A police officer, Akhtar Hayat, had previously mentioned to AFP the explosion of “two or three bombs”. According to him, a “majority of the victims are police officers”.
Since the beginning of the year, the Pakistani Taliban had been associated with two attacks against important police stations.
In January, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a mosque inside a police compound in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing more than 80 officers as the building collapsed.
The following month, five people were killed when a commando from the TTP group, founded in 2007, stormed a police building in Karachi, in the south of the country, sparking a firefight lasting several hours. The TTP accuses the security forces of carrying out extrajudicial executions.
Pakistan has seen a dramatic increase in attacks since the Taliban seized control of neighboring Afghanistan in August.
Pakistani TTP militants have long controlled entire regions of northwestern Pakistan, including the Swat Valley. They were later routed by the military after a 2014 attack that killed nearly 150 people, mostly students.
It was in the Swat Valley that Malala Yousafzai, then 15, was shot in the head by the TTP in 2012 while advocating for girls’ education, a campaign that earned her more later the Nobel Peace Prize.
A tenuous six-month ceasefire between the TTP and Islamabad was shattered in November.
04/25/2023 08:25:57 – Peshawar (Pakistan) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
