PESHAWAR: Suspected militants blew up another school for girls in a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, police and residents said on Friday.

The attack happened in the South Waziristan district that borders Afghanistan. It was the second one this month after another school was badly damaged in the region, according to district police Spokesman Habib Islam.

The overnight attack damaged one room of the facility, however, no one was hurt in its wake.

“A loud bang was heard in the night and police found early morning that a newly built girls’ school in Karikot, a village close to district headquarters of Wana City, was damaged in the explosion,” Islam told Arab News.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for bombing the school, but suspicion was likely to fall on the Pakistani Taliban, who have targeted girls’ schools in the province in the past.

A police officer from Wana said the management of the damaged school had received several threats in the past.

Jalal Wazir, general secretary of the Wana Welfare Association, regretted the bombing and said education was of “paramount importance” to beat illiteracy in the region.

“We can’t compete in today’s world if our girls are left uneducated,” Wazir said. “We will work to promote women education because if you educate a single girl, you educate an entire family.”

On May 9, unidentified militants had blown up a girls’ school on the outskirts of Miran Shah city in the neighboring North Waziristan district, prompting Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to direct authorities to immediately rebuild the damaged facility.

In May last year, two girls’ schools were blown up in the Mir Ali area of the North Waziristan district.

Pakistan witnessed multiple attacks on girls’ schools until 2019, especially in the Swat Valley and elsewhere in the northwest where the Pakistani Taliban long controlled the former tribal regions. In 2012, the insurgents attacked Malala Yousafzai, a teenage student and advocate for the education of girls who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.