ISLAMABAD: The death toll from last week’s bomb attack on a school bus in Pakistan’s Balochistan province has risen to 10 as two more schoolchildren have died during treatment, Pakistani state media reported on Monday.
Balochistan has been the site of an insurgency for decades, though it has intensified more recently, with groups like the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) carrying out high-profile attacks on civilians and security forces.
Wednesday’s bombing killed five Pakistanis, including three school-goers, when their bus was en route to an army-run school in Balochistan’s Khuzdar district. Three more students died later during treatment.
“Two more students, Sheema Ibrahim and Muskan, have also succumbed to their injuries taking the [children’s] toll to eight,” the Radio Pakistan broadcaster reported on Monday.
Pakistani civilian and military officials have blamed the May 21 bombing on India. On Friday, Pakistan’s Interior Secretary Khurram Muhammad Agha described the Khuzdar bombing as an attack on “our values, our education and on the very fabric of our society.”
“Initial findings confirm that this attack is in continuity of a broader pattern of violence sponsored by India through Fitna Al-Hindustan (FAH) operating under the tutelage and the patronage of the Indian intelligence agency R&AW,” he said, without offering any proof to link India to the attack.
New Delhi has distanced itself from the bombing, attributing such acts of violence to Pakistan’s “internal failures.”
The FAH comprises several separatist groups and independently operating cells in the insurgency-hit southwestern Pakistani province, according to Pakistani officials. These cells, after having suffered immense casualties in past few years, have now resorted to hitting “soft targets.”
The rise in deaths from Khuzdar bomb attack comes a day after Pakistan’s army said it had killed nine “Indian-sponsored” militants in three separate operations in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Relations between Pakistan and India touched a new low last month, when gunmen killed 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir in an attack India blamed on Pakistan. Islamabad has denied complicity and called for a credible, international investigation into it.
Pakistan and India have a bitter history and have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir.
The nuclear-armed archfoes traded missile and drones strikes as heightened tensions spiraled into a military four-day conflict this month that ended with a United States-brokered truce on May 10.
Pakistan has mostly blamed India for supporting a separatist insurgency in Balochistan, a southwestern province that borders Iran and Afghanistan. It also accuses it of backing the Pakistani Taliban who regularly carry out attacks in the country’s northwestern and other regions. New Delhi denies the allegations.
