Girls killed in Pakistan school bombing

Four schoolgirls died and 65 were hurt in a bomb attack near a school in North West Pakistan.  Ten people were killed altogether including three US soldiers when an army convoy was targeted near a school in Lower Dir in the North West Frontier Province. The blast levelled much of the Koto Girls' High School, leaving pupils crying for help from under the rubble. “We have four dead bodies.” Said a hospital official. “They are schoolgirls aged 10 to 15.” “We have received 65 injured, most of them are girls,” chief doctor Mohammad Wakeel at the local Taimargara Hospital told Agence France Presse news agency. “The bomb was buried on the roadside close to the school. There were nine rooms in the school, three rooms were completely destroyed,” said police official Yaqub Khan.

The US soldiers were travelling in a convoy alongside Pakistani troops, heading to the opening ceremony of a newly-built girls' school in Maidan, also in Lower Dir. It had been blown up in January 2009 and was rebuilt with the help of a foreign aid organisation. But the bomb went off near Koto Girl’s High School, a packed village along the route to the new school, the BBC reported. The soldiers were believed to have been training Pakistan's Frontier Corps in counter-insurgency operations. The Frontier Corps is responsible for operations against militants in Pakistan’s volatile north west, near the Afghan border.Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani condemned the attack and ordered an investigation.
   
Last year Pakistan carried out a major offensive to crush a Taliban insurgency in Lower Dir and the neighbouring districts of Swat and Buner. Lower Dir borders Bajaur, a district in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt where a suicide bombing killed 17 people at a military checkpoint on Saturday. US officials call Pakistan’s tribal belt the most dangerous place on Earth, rife with Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters and other Islamist militat groups which fled the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The US has that its soldiers are in Pakistan to provide security for US citizens. Western aid groups have been working with the Pakistani government to promote girls’ education in parts of the north west, where Taliban-linked militants opposed to co-education have destroyed hundreds of schools in recent years, burning several to the ground. Many, like the one in Maidan the soldiers were travelling to, are now being rebuilt. 

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children