(Peshawar) A bomb attack on a Pakistani counter-terrorism police station on Monday killed at least seven people and injured 44, and caused the building to collapse, according to official sources.
Several explosions occurred “inside the police station” in Kabal, a town in the Swat Valley (northwest), and caused “the total collapse of the building”, said Khalid Sohail, a police official. from the local counterterrorism department.
“At least seven bodies were taken from the rubble while 44 people were transported to nearby hospitals,” said Bilal Faizi, spokesman for local relief, reporting the latest death toll rose from three to seven dead.
Another police official, Akhtar Hayat, spoke of the explosion of “two or three bombs”. According to him, a “majority of the victims are police officers”.
A search for possible survivors has been launched.
So far, the attack has not been claimed but since the beginning of the year the Pakistani Taliban have been associated with two attacks against important police stations.
In January, a suicide bomber blew up his vest at a mosque inside a police compound in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing more than 80 officers as the building collapsed.
The following month, five people were killed when a commando from the TTP group, founded in 2007, stormed a police building in Karachi, in the south of the country, sparking a firefight lasting several hours. The TTP accuses the security forces of carrying out extrajudicial executions.
Pakistan has seen a dramatic increase in attacks since the Taliban seized control of neighboring Afghanistan in August.
Pakistani TTP militants have long controlled entire regions of northwestern Pakistan, including the Swat Valley. They were later routed by the army after a 2014 attack that killed nearly 150 people, mostly students.
It was in the Swat Valley that Malala Yousafzai, then 15, was shot in the head by the TTP in 2012 while advocating for girls’ education, a campaign that earned her more later the Nobel Peace Prize.
A tenuous six-month ceasefire between the TTP and Islamabad was shattered in November.
