‘Schoolboy’ kills 31 Pakistani army recruits at parade ground

A teenage suicide bomber killed up to 31 Pakistani army recruits at a parade ground yesterday, an attack the Taliban said was revenge for US drone strikes and local military offensives.

Wearing school uniform, the young teen blew himself up at the parade inside a heavily guarded military compound just outside the town of Mardan, killing the soldiers with shrapnel and explosives, officials said.

It was the deadliest suicide bombing in Pakistan since a woman with a bomb strapped under her burqa killed 43 people at a UN food distribution point on Christmas Day in the tribal district of Bajaur.

The Taliban claimed responsibility and threatened “bigger attacks” in coming days to avenge American drone strikes and Pakistani military operations targeting Islamist militants in the northwestern tribal belt.

“It was a suicide attack. The teenager bomber was on foot and was wearing a school uniform,” Abdullah Khan, a senior police officer in Mardan, around 30 kilometres from the regional capital Peshawar, said.

“The death toll has now reached 31 recruits. Thirty-six have been injured, 16 of them are critical,” Mr Khan said.

“The bomber was 14 or 15 years old. He was not a student at the school inside the regiment. He came from outside but was dressed like the other schoolboys.”

After the attack, soldiers in bulletproof jackets and helmets cordoned off the entire area around the Punjab Regiment Centre, deploying jeeps mounted with machine guns and preventing access to the site, an AFP reporter said.

Police had earlier put the death toll at 27.

Separately, militants in Pakistan’s lawless North Waziristan tribal district shot three people dead yesterday including two tribal policemen, accusing them of spying for the United States, local officials said.

Militants frequently kidnap and kill tribesmen in the troubled region, accusing them of spying for the Pakistani government or for US forces in Afghanistan, where Taliban fighters have been waging a vicious insurgency.

Pakistan suffers near-daily attacks blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants – the attacks have killed more than 4,000 people since government troops evicted Islamists from an Islamabad mosque in a deadly July 2007 siege.

Most of the violence is concentrated in the northwest, where Washington has branded the lawless tribal belt snaking along the border with Afghanistan the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda and the most dangerous place on earth.

A suicide attack at the same army base in Mardan killed at least 42 soldiers in 2006 and another attack nearby killed 13 people in 2008.

Pakistan is under pressure to eliminate militant sanctuaries to help US efforts to win the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and defeat Al-Qaeda.