Increase font size Decrease font size Reset font size

Militants blow up boys school in Hangu

By Abdul Sami Paracha 2014-02-16
KOHAT: Unknown militants blew up a government high school for boys with improvised explo-sive devices (IEDs) in Tora Warai area of Hangu district in the small hours of Saturday, police said.

They said that the incident took place at around 2am when two huge explosions levelled the school building. Later, in the morning the bomb disposal squad reached the scene and defused three IEDs before start of the school classes.

The school has been destroyed at a time when the papers of 9thand 10th classes under the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, Kohat, are set for next month whereas the building could not be reconstructed in a short span of time.

The district administration said that all the classes of the destroyed school would be shifted to other nearby schools to save future of the children. The police have registered the case against unknown terrorists.Last week, three school teachers were killed by masked men in Kach Banda in Hangu in a terrorist attack.

The police high-ups said that several splinter groups of the outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) were hiding in the bordering Orakzai Agency and they could be behind the explosions and targeted killings.

The intelligence agencies and tribal administration had beentrying to bring the TTP groups under their control after the start of peace talks.

However, they could manage to bring only one group of commander Arif to negotiating table under a secret deal, sources said.

They claimed that the peace talks had divided the TTP into several groups.

They said that it was technically not possible to hold talks with all the groups.