Suicide bomber attacks outside Islamabad courthouse, killing 12, Pakistani interior minister says
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Pakistan’s interior minister said a suicide bomber detonated his explosives near a police vehicle outside the gate of a district court in Islamabad on Tuesday, killing 12 people and injuring 27 others.
The attacker tried “to enter the court premises but, failing to do so, he targeted a police vehicle”, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi told the press.
He did not blame any militant group but added that authorities were “looking at all aspects” of the attack. Naqvi said police investigators confirmed the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, but Pakistan faces militant attacks across the country and a resurgence of the Pakistani Taliban.
Two security officials told The Associated Press that a car bomb caused the explosion. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak officially to the media.
There was no immediate comment from Islamabad police, who said they were continuing their investigation.
Earlier Tuesday, Pakistani security forces said they foiled an overnight attempt by militants to take cadets hostage at a military college, when a suicide bomber and five other Pakistani Taliban targeted the facility in a northwestern province.
The attack began on Monday evening, when a suicide bomber attempted to storm the cadet college in Wana, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, near the Afghan border. The region until recent years served as a base for the Pakistani Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other foreign militants.
According to Alamgir Mahsud, the local police chief, two of the militants were quickly killed by troops while three militants managed to enter the compound before being cornered in an administrative block. Army commandos were part of the forces carrying out a mine clearance operation and intermittent exchanges of fire continued on Tuesday, Mahsud said.
The administration block is located away from the building housing hundreds of cadets and other staff.
The Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, which is separate from but allied with the Afghan Taliban, has denied any involvement in the college attack. The group has become emboldened since the Taliban took power in Kabul in 2021, and many of its leaders and fighters are believed to have taken refuge in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has seen a surge in militant attacks in recent years. The deadliest attack on a school took place in 2014, when Taliban gunmen killed 154 people, mostly children, at a military school in Peshawar. According to the army, the attackers wanted to repeat on Monday what happened during the 2014 attack in Peshawar.
Tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan have increased in recent months. Kabul blamed Islamabad for the October 9 drone strikes that killed several people in the Afghan capital and vowed to retaliate. Ensuing cross-border fighting killed dozens of soldiers, civilians and militants before Qatar established a ceasefire on October 19, which remains in effect.
Since then, two rounds of peace talks have taken place in Istanbul – the last on Thursday – but ended without an agreement after Kabul refused to provide a written assurance that the TTP and other militant groups would not use Afghan territory against Pakistan. A previous, brief ceasefire between Pakistan and the TTP, brokered by Kabul in 2022, later collapsed after the group accused Islamabad of violating it.
