First Suicide Bombing in Eight Years Hits Pakistan’s Capital

Kamran Haider and Khalid Qayum
·2 min read
13

(Bloomberg) -- A suicide bomber and his accomplice detonated explosives in Pakistan’s capital when police tried to check their vehicle, killing themselves, one policeman and injuring five people.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The incident, the first such attack in Islamabad in more than eight years, took place in a neighborhood close to the garrison town of Rawalpindi, local police said on Twitter. An attack in 2014 in a court complex had killed 10 people.

Separately, Deputy Inspector General of Islamabad Police, Sohail Zafar Chatta, told reporters that a woman was accompanying the attacker in the vehicle. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a militant group with links to the Afghan Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the blast, the Dawn newspaper reported.

Friday’s attack comes less than a month after the TTP ended a cease-fire with the government in Islamabad and announced a resumption of attacks across the nation. The cease-fire, brokered by the Taliban-run government in Afghanistan, had been in place since May this year.

With the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, Islamabad has been concerned that a spillover in terror activities could affect investments, including China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Pakistan has already faced pressure from Beijing, which called on the government to protect such projects after a bus explosion in July last year killed 12 workers, including nine Chinese citizens.

According to the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, militant violence spiked by 24% in the first eleven months of this year compared with the same period in 2021.

The TTP or Pakistani Taliban, has killed more than 70,000 people over the past few decades and engineered some of Pakistan’s worst terrorist attacks, including one on an army school that killed 150 people in Peshawar in 2014. The group operates across the border between the two countries.

Condemning the attack, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said, “terrorists are Pakistan’s enemy. This country will be cleaned of this evil.”

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.