At least 12 people were killed and 27 others wounded on Tuesday in an attack on Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, according to officials. It was the first major attack to hit the city in more than a decade and comes as Pakistan is facing a resurgence of assaults by several insurgencies.
An attacker detonated a bomb near the entrance of a courthouse around lunchtime, according to the Pakistani interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi. He said the attacker had tried but failed to enter the court complex, with hundreds of lawyers, defendants and judges inside. The attacker died at the scene, the authorities said. The attack has raised alarm that insurgent violence, confined in recent years to Pakistan’s western regions, has reached its urban centers. Islamabad, a quiet, leafy city of a million people, is the seat of political power and home to embassies and the headquarters of many international organizations. The Pakistani defense minister, Khawaja Asif, said Pakistan was “in a state of war.”
“Anyone who thinks that the Pakistan Army is fighting this war in the Afghan-Pakistan border region and the remote areas of
Balochistan should take today’s suicide attack at the Islamabad district courts as a wake-up call: This is a war for all of Pakistan,” Mr. Asif said on social media. Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute in Washington, called the attack “deeply ominous.”
“Bomb blasts have moved from the frontier back into Pakistan’s cities,” he said in a text message. “With its guarded checkpoints into the city and proximity to army headquarters, Islamabad is the ultimate litmus test. If Islamabad isn’t safe, nowhere is.” A group affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, according to The Khorasan Diary, a digital platform in Islamabad that monitors militant activity in the region. Through a spokesman, the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or T.T.P., denied any connection to the blast. A similar situation occurred in 2023 when a suicide bombing killed more than 100 people, mostly police officers, at a mosque in the northwestern city of Peshawar. A group linked to the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, but the T.T.P. distanced itself, saying it avoided targeting civilians.Without providing evidence, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan accused India in a social media post of having instigated Tuesday’s courthouse attack and Afghanistan of harboring the attackers…Source: nytimes.com/
