Suicide car bomber strikes a school bus in southwestern Pakistan, killing 4 children, officials say

A suicide car bomber struck a school bus in southwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing five people — including at least three children — and wounding 38 others, officials said.

It was the latest attack in the tense Balochistan province.

The province has been the scene of a long-running insurgency, with an array of separatist groups staging attacks, including the outlawed Balochistan Liberation Army, or BLA, designated as a terror group by the United States in 2019.

A local deputy commissioner, Yasir Iqbal, said the attack took place on the outskirts of the city of Khuduzar as the bus was transporting children to their military-run school there.

Troops quickly arrived at the scene and cordoned off the area while ambulances transported the victims to hospitals in the city. Local television stations aired footage of the badly damaged bus and scattered debris.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but suspicion is likely to fall on ethnic Baloch separatists, who frequently target security forces and civilians in the region.

Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi strongly condemned the attack and expressed deep sorrow over the children’s deaths.

He called the perpetrators “beasts” who deserve no leniency, saying the enemy had committed an act of “sheer barbarism by targeting innocent children.”

The military also issued a statement, saying the bombing was “yet another cowardly and ghastly attack” allegedly planned by neighboring India and carried out by “its proxies in Balochistan.”

There was no immediate comment from New Delhi.

Officials, who initially reported that four children were killed but later revised the death toll to say two adults were also among the dead, said they fear the toll may rise further as several children were listed in critical condition.

Most of the attacks in the province are claimed by the BLA, which Pakistan clams has India’s backing — a claim that New Delhi denies.

In one of the deadliest such attacks, BLA insurgents killed 33 people, mostly soldiers, during an assault on a train carrying hundreds of passengers in Balochistan in March.

Earlier this week, the BLA vowed more attacks on the “Pakistani army and its collaborators” and says its goal is to “lay the foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and independent Balochistan.”

And in a rare move earlier this month, during a period of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan amid a cross-border escalation between the two nuclear-armed neighbors that raised fears of a broader war, the BLA appealed to India for support.

There was no immediate response from India to the appeal.

Militant groups are also active in the Balochistan and though it is unusual for separatists to target school children in the province, such attacks have been carried out in the restive northwest and elsewhere in the country in recent years.

Most schools and colleges in Pakistan are operated by the government or the private sector, though the military also runs a significant number of institutions for children of both civilians and of serving or retired army personnel.

In 2014, the Pakistani Taliban carried out the country’s deadliest school attack on an army-run institution in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing 154 people, most of them children.