/ 21 June 2011

Child found wearing 8kg suicide vest in Pakistan

Pakistani police said on Monday they had detained a nine-year-old schoolgirl allegedly strapped with a bomb and told to blow up a police checkpoint in the country’s troubled north-west.

Although her intentions could not be confirmed independently, it was the first time such a young girl has been reported carrying explosives in Pakistan and could signal a disturbing new tactic for the Taliban and other militants.

She was arrested about 50m from the Islam Darra police checkpoint on the outskirts of Taimargara, the main town in the district of Lower Dir, where Pakistan in 2009 fought to put down a Taliban insurgency.

Police said the girl claimed to have been abducted several days ago in the main north-western city of Peshawar and had been taken to Lower Dir near the Afghan border.

‘They told me to push the button when I reach near policemen’
“She was wearing eight kilogrammes of explosives which was quite heavy for her age. Her body language was suspicious,” Qazi Jamil-ur-Rehman, the regional police chief, told Agence France-Presse by telephone.

“She is an innocent school girl and was scared. She is with us and we are trying to reach her family,” Rehman added.

The girl appeared on national television wearing her blue and white school uniform.

“They kept me in a house and they told me to push the button when I reach near policemen,” she told reporters during a press conference.

Police said they were hunting those responsible.

Suicide attacks carried out by women and children are very rare in Pakistan but militant groups have frequently used teenage boys.

On December 26 2010, a burqa-clad female suicide bomber struck a UN food distribution point and killed 43 people in Khar, the main town in the restive Bajaur tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

Nearly 4 500 people have been killed across Pakistan in attacks blamed on Taliban and other Islamist extremist networks based in the tribal belt since government troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad in 2007. – AFP