Pakistani soldiers patrol next to a newly fenced border fencing along Afghan border at Kitton Orchard Post in Pakistan’s North Waziristan in October 2017. (File photo) via SG.
A car bomb attack in Pakistan has killed at least 13 soldiers and injured civilians.
Pakistani officials said a suicide bomber drove a vehicle packed with explosives into a military convoy in the north-western tribal region of North Waziristan, near the border with Afghanistan, on Saturday.
Pakistan alleged that the militants behind the attack were backed by India, but Delhi quickly denied this.
Dismissing Pakistan’s accusation, Randhir Jaiswal, spokesman for India’s ministry of external affairs, posted on X: “We reject this statement with the contempt it deserves.”
The attack has been claimed by a suicide bomber wing of the Hafiz Gul Bahadur armed group, a faction of the Pakistan Taliban.
Pakistan’s army, however, said the attack was carried out by militants backed by India, without providing evidence.
“In this tragic and barbaric incident, three innocent civilians including two children and a woman also got severely injured,” the Pakistani army said in a statement.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the “cowardly act”.
Relations between the two nations have long been strained, but tensions deepened in April after a deadly attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir left 26 people dead.
India blamed Pakistan for sheltering members of a militant group it said were behind the attack, and the incident brought the two nuclear-armed countries to the brink of another war.
In May, India launched a series of airstrikes, targeting sites it called “terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir”.
Pakistan denied the claim that these were terror camps and also responded by firing missiles and deploying drones into Indian territory.
The hostilities continued until 10 May when US President Donald Trump announced that India and Pakistan had agreed to a “full and immediate ceasefire”.
Pakistan has witnessed a surge in terrorist incidents following the collapse of the ceasefire agreement between the government and the Pakistani Taliban in November 2022. — BBC via SG
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