A brutal attack by gunmen has resulted in at least 38 deaths and 29 others injured when the assailants opened fire on passenger vans in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The attack took place in the tribal region of Kurram, showing the increasing insecurity in that region.
Chief Secretary for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Nadeem Aslam Chaudhry, confirmed the grim numbers, stating that armed men targeted two passenger convoys traveling between Parachinar and Peshawar.
“There were two convoys of passenger vehicles, one carrying passengers from Peshawar to Parachinar and another from Parachinar to Peshawar, when armed men opened fire on them,” said local resident Ziarat Hussain in a phone interview with Reuters. His relatives were also traveling in the convoy, he added.
The attack has resulted in the killing of a woman and a child, and authorities warn that the death toll is likely to rise further.
Till date, no organization has come forward to claim this attack. The sense of not being held accountable has left many residents and officials in a daze while intensifying fearful sentiments in an already charged area.
Leaders React To The Atrocity
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari expressed his strong condemnation of the attack by calling it “a cowardly and inhuman act” in his X post.
Chairperson of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, also condemned the assault and demanded quick justice. “Maintenance of law and order is a collective responsibility of the government. Lives of civilians must be protected,” he said on X through party media cell.
Bloodshed In Kurram
The Kurram region, on Afghanistan’s border, has long been a tinderbox of sectarian Sunni-Shia tensions. Further complicating them have been land disputes, which often fuel these tensions. Such attacks have increasingly become common here, intensifying destabilization in the region.
This is the second attack like this one in August when 23 people were massacred in Balochistan. Here, the militants stopped buses, trucks, and vans and took the passengers out and identified and then executed them on ethnicity grounds.
The current tragedy has again brought voices for enhanced security measures and proactive governance to safeguard civilians in Pakistan’s areas of strife.
