Oct. 11 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Thousands of people have marched on Tuesday through various regions of northwestern Pakistan to demand that the government act against the perpetrators of the attack on a school bus on Monday, which left the driver dead and two students injured.
The largest mobilization has taken place in Swat, where armed men attacked a school vehicle on Monday. An attack that locals attribute to Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), known as the Pakistani Taliban.
The demonstrators have announced that they will march towards the capital, Islamabad, if the Government does not take action against those responsible for the attack within 24 hours. “We will spend the whole night in the open air, continuing with the protest,” said one of these people who has come to protest, according to the newspaper ‘Dawn’.
“The government is not taking the issue seriously,” Haider Ali, a social activist, has denounced to this same medium, at the same time as he has protested that the authorities they have sent to listen to their demands “have no power “.
In addition to the arrest of those responsible, the demonstrators have asked the Government to reinforce security in the region, bordering Afghanistan, due to fear of the possible resurgence of fundamentalists, who already had control of the area between 2007 and 2009.
The Pakistani Taliban, who differ from the Afghans in organizational matters but agree on the same rigorous interpretation of Sunni Islam, bring together more than a dozen Islamist militant groups operating in Pakistan, where they have killed some 70,000 people in two decades of violence.
The government of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan reached a month-long ceasefire agreement with the TTP in November 2021, although it was not extended, amid fears that the Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan months earlier could give them more strength.
