Militants blew up a boys’ primary school in northwest Pakistan yesterday, the latest in a wave of attacks by Islamist extremists targeting educational institutes, local officials said.
No one was hurt in the bombing in the village of Ashraf Kalay in the Khyber tribal region, which lies between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s northwest capital Peshawar, the officials said.
“Militants blew up a government boys’ primary school with explosives at around 3am,” tribal administration official Daulat Khan said, adding that all seven rooms of the school were destroyed.
Another local administration official, Rehan Gul Khattak, blamed the attack on the militant group Lashkar-e-Islam.
Lashkar-e-Islam is the main extremist group operating in Khyber and has some ideological ties to the Pakistani Taliban.
The military launched an offensive against the group last year, but have yet to capture its leader Mangal Bagh.
Islamist militants opposed to co-education have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in northwest Pakistan in recent years.
Elsewhere in the restive northwest, four suspected militants were killed in a clash with security forces in Swat valley late on Sunday, the paramilitary Frontier Corps said in a statement..
Swat, a former tourist resort, slipped out of government control in July 2007, but the army claims to have largely cleared the area of Taliban rebels after launching a major military operation there last spring.
Meanwhile, at least one suspected US drone fired on a house in Pakistan’s volatile tribal region, killing 20 people in the 11th such attack since militants in the area orchestrated a deadly suicide bombing against the CIA in Afghanistan, intelligence officials said.
Four missiles slammed into the house Sunday in the Shaktoi area of South Waziristan, the same region where a drone strike on Thursday targeted a meeting of militant commanders in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to kill Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud.
The militant leader helped organize the Dec. 30 attack against a remote CIA base in Afghanistan’s Khost Province that killed seven of the agency’s employees and appeared in a video alongside the Jordanian man who carried out the bombing.
Analysts suspect the Haqqani network, an al-Qaeda-linked Afghan Taliban faction based in North Waziristan, also helped carry out the CIA attack, the worst against the spy agency in decades.
Since the bombing, the US has carried out eleven suspected drone strikes in North and South Waziristan, an unprecedented volley of attacks since the CIA-led program began in earnest in Pakistan two years ago.
The house targeted in Sunday’s attack was being used by Usman Jan, the head of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, intelligence officials said. Five Uzbeks were killed in the strike, but it was unclear if Jan was among them. Jan’s predecessor, Tahir Yuldash, was also killed in a drone strike in South Waziristan last year.
The other 15 people killed in Sunday’s strike were Pakistani Taliban, the officials said.
Four more militants were seriously wounded, but their identities were unknown, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
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