Pakistan: Afghan-based terrorists planned suicide attack on Chinese engineers

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan said Tuesday that recent militant attacks in the country, including a deadly suicide car bombing on Chinese engineers, were planned from “terrorist sanctuaries” in Afghanistan. Major-General Ahmed Sharif, spokesperson for Pakistan’s military, leveled the allegations during a live broadcast news conference. He said Afghanistan’s Taliban government has failed to prevent the use of Afghan soil for cross-border terrorism despite repeated protests and sharing of “solid evidence” with them through diplomatic channels. In late March, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into a convoy of Chinese engineers and workers in northwestern Pakistan, killing five of them and their local driver. The slain Chinese nationals were working on a major dam project. “This attack was planned in Afghanistan, and terrorists and their facilitators were also being controlled from there,” said Sharif. “The car used in it was readied in Afghanistan, and the suicide bomber was also an Afghan national.” The spokesperson also said Pakistani security forces captured and killed several Afghan nationals who were carrying out recent terrorist attacks, adding that members of the Afghan-based, anti-Pakistan Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, along with other fugitive insurgents, orchestrated the cross-border terror attacks. Explaining that the Afghanistan-based terror group is aiming to undermine peace and stability in Pakistan, Sharif said, “The main reason for the new wave of terrorism in Pakistan is the facilitation and supply of modern weapons to the TTP” by elements in the Taliban government. There was no immediate reaction from Taliban representatives, but Kabul has rejected such allegations in the past, maintaining it still bars anyone from attacking Pakistan or any country. Surging TTP and other insurgent attacks have strained Islamabad’s ties with Kabul. TTP, designated as a global terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations, is a close ally of Afghanistan’s fundamentalist Taliban rulers. The group is known to have provided recruits and shelter to Taliban leaders in Pakistani border areas when the Taliban was staging insurgent attacks against the U.S.-led NATO troops in Afghanistan for almost two decades. The Taliban seized power in 2021 as all foreign forces withdrew from the country. Pakistani officials and the latest United Nations assessments have documented the presence of thousands of TTP fighters on Afghan soil since the Taliban takeover. Sharif said Tuesday that growing incidents of terrorism in Pakistan prompted the government to evict undocumented Afghans and send them back to their native country. He noted that more than 563,000 Afghans living illegally in Pakistan had gone home since October, when Islamabad began its crackdown on undocumented migrants. The crackdown is not targeting an estimated 1.3 million registered Afghan refugees in the country and the more than 800,000 others carrying government-approved Afghan citizenship cards.