By Theodore Shoebat
Muslim Taliban terrorists entered a Christian neighborhood in Pakistan and slaughtered twelve people, and injured thirty people. According to a military report, officers then rushed in and killed all of the terrorists. According to one report:
At least 12 people were killed and 30 wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up Friday just outside a district court in Pakistan’s northwest province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, police said.
They said the lone attacker threw a grenade at the entrance and then detonated his vest after an officer at the gate called him aside to be searched.
The terrorist attack occurred just hours after four would-be suicide bombers entered a community of minority Christians near Peshawar City, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, shooting and wounding a security guard and three other security officers in an exchange of gunfire.
The assailants were all shot and killed, according to the military spokesman’s office in Islamabad.
The courthouse bombing took place in the center of Mardan, a busy commercial city in the restive province near Pakistan’s tribal region along the Afghan border that is home to a variety of Islamist militant groups.
Police said the dead included four lawyers, two police officers and nine other civilians, while 10 of the wounded were in critical condition at a nearby hospital.
Both attacks were claimed by the Jamaat-ur-Ahrar group, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, which also claimed a massive assault that killed 93 people, including numerous lawyers, in the southwestern city of Quetta a month earlier.
In that Aug. 8 attack, a prominent attorney was gunned down and then bombers blew themselves up outside a hospital where dozens of his colleagues had gathered to protest and mourn his death.
Shireen Zada, a lawyer who was wounded in the Mardan bombing, said she had seen the man approach the security gate of the courthouse and throw a grenade when a police officer accosted him. “I was standing outside the court when a door fell on top of me from the first blast,” she said. “That’s how I was saved from the second attempt.”
Police said all other attorneys, judges and other court personnel had been taken to safety, and rescue officials said between 30 and 40 people had been taken to various hospitals for treatment.