Pakistan police say ‘personal enmity’ behind attack on school van, killing two girls

ISLAMABAD: Two girls were killed and six others, including a driver, injured when a school van came under attack in Pakistan’s Attock district on Thursday, the latest deadly assault in the region on school going children.
While schools vans and campuses have been attacked in the past by militants who are opposed particularly to girls going to school, an initial police probe into the latest violence suggested personal enmity between the driver’s family and the unknown attackers.
“This incident occurred in Dheri Chohan village near the Saddar area of Attock,” Muhammad Safeer, a police spokesperson in the area, told Arab News. “It was the result of an enmity between two groups, with the van driver as the main target.”
“However, during the indiscriminate firing, two girls were killed and six others injured, including five girls and the driver.”
Safeer said the driver was the main target of the attackers, not the children traveling with him.
The two girls killed in the attack were nine and 10 years of age, according to Rescue 1122 officials in the area, while other children in the van were between eight and 12 years old.
“Those who target innocent children do not deserve to be called human,” he said. “Firing on children in a school van is an act of brutality,” Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said in a statement. “Those who display such barbarism do not deserve any leniency.”
Maryam Nawaz, the chief minister of Punjab where Attock is located, also took notice of the incident and sought a report from the area’s administrative officials. 
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai was 14 when she was shot in the head in 2012 in Swat Valley by Taliban militants over her advocacy for girls’ education and opposition to terrorism. Since then, many schools in Pakistan’s northwestern regions bordering Afghanistan have been attacked by suspected militants.