Female suicide bomber responsible for attack that killed 24

Islamabad: Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban for promoting girls’ education, on Monday denounced an attack on a bus carrying female students in Quetta as “cowardly”.

“This was a cowardly and desperate attempt to deny girls their right to education,” Malala, 15, said in a statement.

Malala was shot at point-blank range by a Taliban gunman as her school bus travelled through northwest Pakistan’s Swat Valley on October 9 last year, in an attack that drew worldwide condemnation.

She was flown to Britain for surgery on her head injuries and returned to school in Birmingham, central England, in March.

The weekend bus bombing, in which 14 female university students were killed in the capital city of Pakistan’s troubled Balochistan province, was carried out by a woman suicide bomber, Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan told the National Assembly on Monday.

Speaking in the assembly, the minister said a total of 24 people were killed and 34 injured in Saturday’s explosion on a bus of a women’s university in Quetta and subsequent attack by militants on a city hospital as doctors there were treating the injured.

Earlier on the same day, away from Quetta in the northern part of Balochistan, militants blew up a historical national heritage building at Ziarat summer resort where Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah spent his last days in 1948.

The interior minister, who visited Balochistan on Sunday, said four militants were killed by the security forces during an operation at the Bloan Medical Complex and one was captured alive.

He said a joint investigation team comprising senior officials from security and law and order agencies was probing the Ziarat attack. The team’s report will be presented to the National Assembly and made public after completion of the probe, he said.

A banned outfit calling itself Balochistan Liberation Army, one of the militant groups involved in the decade-long separatist insurgency in the mineral-rich province, had claimed responsibility for the Ziarat bombing, while religious extremist group Lashkar e Jhangvi said it had carried out the attacks in Quetta.

The interior minister assured the assembly that the Ziarat building would be renovated and restored within four months.

He said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif planned to convene a high level meeting to gather input on security issues from political leaders all over the country.

Khan said he would also visit northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and southern Sindh provinces with provincial chief ministers and governors over security matters and the federal government would extend full support to provinces for strengthening security.

Speaking to the media during his visit to Balochistan, the interior minister said the government believed in dialogue to resolve issues in the region but talks would not be held with elements bent upon continuing militancy.