A minimum of 13 killed after two explosions rocked police workplace in northwest Pakistan on Monday.
Peshawar:
Two explosions in a counter-terrorism ammunition depot in northwest Pakistan killed not less than 13 individuals and wounded over 50 on Monday, police mentioned.
Provincial police chief Akhtar Hayat mentioned the explosions rocked the counter-terrorism workplace in northwestern Swat valley, which was beforehand lengthy managed by Islamist militants earlier than they had been flushed out in a army operation in 2009.
His spokesman mentioned in a press release issued later that ammunition caught hearth, “likely as a result of an electrical short-circuit. No proof of an assault from outdoors has been established to date.”
Pakistani police and army have gotten a big presence of their counter-terrorism employees within the valley, which has been susceptible to the insurgency.
The militants additionally shot at and wounded Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai in 2012 within the scenic valley, the birthplace of Mullah Fazlullah, the previous chief of the Pakistani Taliban, who was killed in an air strike in neighbouring Afghanistan in 2018.
Different features of the explosions are being investigated, the spokesman mentioned.
Most of these killed within the blasts had been police counter-terrorism officers, Hayat mentioned, including {that a} girl and her baby who had been passing by the constructing had been additionally killed.
The regional chief of the counter-terrorism division Sohail Khalid advised reporters that the explosions didn’t seem like a suicide assault or different act of terrorism.
“There was a retailer the place we had an enormous amount of weapons, and till now we imagine that there might need some blast in it as a result of some carelessness” he mentioned, including, “We’re preserving all our choices open.”
A hospital administration mentioned it obtained a number of wounded individuals for therapy, a few of them in vital situation.
(Aside from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is revealed from a syndicated feed.)
