A high school in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir’s Jhang region was raided by assailants when Barrister Sultan Mehmood Chaudhry, the president of PoK was meeting United Nations officials in New York, news agency ANI reported citing Pakistan-based news media outlets.
The assailants molested female students, attacked the school authorities and ransacked the school. They also held the school students hostage and whipped their knives and guns at the students. The incident has sent shockwaves through the community and the report said that parents were concerned regarding the security of children.
The report said that the attack comes amid the Gilgit-Baltistan region suffering from a food and power crisis. The region is also seeing high crime rates as the population is increasing but there are less resources and more poverty and unemployment.
Experts and human rights activists say that residents living in PoK now demand freedom from Pakistan because they feel they are being subjugated by the federal government. News agency ANI in its report quoted human rights activist Amjad Ayub Mirza who said that the federal government is not paying heed to the demands and the government has also failed to take note of the growing discontentment among the people.
Pakistan has a history of schools being targeted by terrorists. In 2014, terrorists from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) killed 149 people of which 132 were school students, when they opened fire on students in Peshawar’s Army Public School.
The TTP recently carried out a suicide bombing in Peshawar which led to the deaths of at least 100 people. The officials have revised the death toll to 84.
The TTP also carried out an attack on Bacha Khan University in Pakistan’s Charsadda in 2016. At least 22 people died in the terrorist attack and more than 200 students were rescued by security forces.
The Pakistan Taliban is also responsible for shooting Nobel Peace Prize Winner Malala Yousufzai on October 2012 when she was an education activist.
Read all the Latest News here