At least 59 cadets and guards are dead after a triple suicide attack hit a police college south of the Pakistani city of Quetta on Monday. More than 120 people were wounded in the attack.
Three suicide-vest donning militants with AK-47s entered the college on Monday night while cadets were sleeping and took hostages, the BBC reported. Trainees, numbering in the hundreds, evacuated the school while local troops arrived. Fighting lasted around four hours, according to Newsweek Pakistan. Three explosions were also reported by local media.
“Security was already on high alert, and maybe that is why they have targeted the police training center on the outskirts of the city,” Baluchistan’s chief minister, Nawab Sanaullah Zehri told the New York Times.
The attack was claimed by ISIS through its Aamaq news agency, but accusations are flying in many directions. Some local officials blamed Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni supremacist militant group linked to the Taliban, while Balochistan Home Minister Sarfaraz Bugti said the attack was planned and coordinated in Afghanistan. According to the AP, the Hakimullah group, a local Taliban offshoot, has also claimed responsibility for the attack.
VIDEO: A victim of the #Quetta police academy attack describes his ordeal. 60 people were killed in the brutal gun and suicide bomb assault pic.twitter.com/9uP9IEbMvn
— TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) October 25, 2016
The college is home to around 700 recruits and is 20 kilometers south of Quetta. The college itself, isolated from populated areas, has come under rocket fire in the past. Six policemen were killed in a 2006 attack when five explosions detonated at the college.
Two attackers detonated their vests while the third was killed in a firefight.
In August, another attack was carried out on the emergency ward of a hospital that killed 88 people. ISIS claimed that attack, but so did a faction of the Afghan Taliban.
Some believe attacks like this are a result of Pakistan’s own policy of coddling militant groups. “Northern Balochistan has been home to Afghan Taliban who have long-standing links not only to elements within the Pakistani establishment but also to al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban groups that have since turned against Islamabad,” the BBC’s M Ilyas Khan reported.
ISIS’ first attack in Pakistan came in April 2015 and killed three soldiers. The group formed an Afghanistan and Pakistan branch in January of last year, but their leader was killed in a drone strike this past July.