The Foreign Ministry of Pakistan said that the attack on a bus in the country’s northern area last month was a suicide attack carried out by a branch of the Pakistani Taliban. The attack had killed 10 Chinese labourers and three Pakistanis.
The Ministry made the claims on Friday and placed the blame for the bombing on the Indian and Afghan intelligence services.
Earlier on Thursday, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi also addressed a press conference regarding the same and was flanked by Javed Iqbal, a senior counterterrorism police officer, and Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri, the foreign ministry’s spokesman.
“The explosive [improvised explosive device]-laden vehicle, the driver who did this entire attack, we found a thumb from the site and we found a finger and we found [other] body parts,” Aljazeera quoted Qureshi as having said. “The suicide bomber, they were obviously his.”
The report quoting Qureshi said the vehicle used in the attack had been smuggled into Pakistan from Afghanistan.
Quoting Qureshi further, the report said: “According to our investigation, Afghanistan’s soil was used for this attack, for its planning, its execution and the making of the plans, we see them clearly connected to an NDS and RAW nexus.”
The National Directorate of Security (NDS) is the Afghan intelligence agency, while the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) is India’s main intelligence agency.
On July 14, the attack took place in the northern Pakistan region of Dasu, targeting a bus carrying Chinese and Pakistani workers to the site of an under-construction hydroelectric dam, part of the $60bn China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project.
The report quoting Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said the attack was carried out by the Swat chapter of the Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, an armed group that has waged a war against Pakistani forces since 2007 and is suspected to be based in eastern Afghanistan after Pakistani military operations displaced it from its strongholds in the country.
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