Four boys killed in Taliban bus attack

Taliban ambushed a Pakistani school bus yesterday, killing four boys and the driver in a hail of bullets and rocket fire on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar, police said.

The children studied at an elite English-language school of a type reviled by hardline Islamist militants who oppose what they see as Western-imported, secular education. Two seven-year-old girls on the bus were also wounded.

The children were targeted in the Matani area close to Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt, which the US considers the most dangerous region on earth and an Al-Qaeda headquarters.

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the attack saying it was the work of their Khyber chapter.

Bombings by Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked networks have killed more than 4,630 people since 2007, destabilising the nuclear-armed state.

“Gunmen opened fire on a school van and also lobbed a rocket in Peshawar’s suburb of Matani,” senior police official Ejaz Khan said.

Police said the bus was taking children home at the end of the school day, which in Pakistan finishes in the early afternoon. Senior police official Kalam Khan said from the scene that four boys were killed along with the bus driver.

“The gunmen were waiting for the bus in fields and attacked when it came close. They fired a rocket and then fired bullets on the van,” he said.

TTP spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said the purpose of the attack “was to punish the Kakakhel tribe who formed a lashkar against us”, referring to state-backed anti-Taliban militias.

“The Kalakhels were warned but they did not disband the lashkar, and we again warn all other lashkars that they will meet the same fate for opposing the Taliban at America’s behest,” he added.

Outside Peshawar’s main hospital, Jahandar Shah, whose seven-year-old son Jamal died, sobbed uncontrollably and smothered his forehead in kisses as he tried to pull his blood-stained body from a stretcher onto his lap.