Swat Valley: a policeman shoots students at a Catholic school, an 8-year-old girl died

Muhammad Alam Khan, employed as a school guard, has been detained while his motive is being investigated. The school had already been closed by terrorist attacks by the Taliban, who in 2012 had shot Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai in the same area. In the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, on the border with Afghanistan, there has been an increase in attacks in the last year.

Peshawar () – A police officer guarding a Catholic girls’ school in northwest Pakistan shot at a school bus carrying teachers and students, killing an eight-year-old girl. At least six other girls and one woman were injured in the shooting, which took place in the Sangota area of ​​the Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

This is the same region from which Malala Yousafzai hails, the activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize for campaigning against the Pakistani Taliban (Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, or TTP) ban on female education. In 2012, she, too, had been hit by a bullet in the head as she was returning from school by bus, while a few years earlier the same Catholic institution, the Sangota public school, had had to close due to threats and terrorist attacks.

The policeman who opened fire on the students yesterday was arrested and identified as Muhammad Alam Khan. The motive for the violence is unclear: although a police officer ruled out that it was a militant attack, the district police chief announced that an investigation has been opened. According to the local press, Alan Khan, a native of the Salampur area, had been working at the school for three months, and had already been suspended twice from the armed forces for reasons that are currently unclear.

Adil Ghouri, president of the Christan Awareness Movement (Masihi Tehreek-e Beadari), along with other Christian activists, condemned the incident and called for the provincial government to intervene.

Founded in 1962, the Catholic Public High School (better known as Sangota Public School), began operating under the direction of the Diocese of Islamabad-Rawalpindi and was for a long time run by the Irish nuns of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It became an all-female institute in the 1990s and was leveled in 2009 by an attack by Islamic fundamentalists that claimed no lives only because the nuns had already evacuated the female students. Two years earlier, the director had received a threatening letter signed by the radical Islamic militant group Khan Nisaran-e-Islam accusing the nuns of converting Muslim girls to Christianity, despite the fact that the 99% of the students professed the Islamic faith. It was not until 2012, within the framework of the anti-terrorist operations of the Pakistani government, that the school could not be reopened, which initially had only three nuns and 80 girls. Today it welcomes more than 800 students, four nuns, 26 teachers and 10 other employees.

However, the experts match in which the Taliban recapture of Afghanistan in August 2021 galvanized the TTP and other terrorist groups operating in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and in other border areas, such as Ballucistan. According to data from South Asia Terrorism Portalin 2022 in KP there were 527 deaths (among civilians, armed forces personnel and terrorists), compared to 300 the previous year.

A growing trend that is returning to worrying levels (meanwhile, the government is dealing with infighting between the executive and the opposition): terrorist attacks went from 168 in 2021 to 225 in 2022, in addition to the consequent increase in the most violent incidents. According to data published by the Peshawar anti-terror department, in the first four months of 2023 there were 180 terrorist attacks in the same province, compared to 133 in the last four months of last year.

Regarding casualties among the armed forces, the 2022 count is the worst since 2013, with December being the deadliest month in the last 10 years. Pakistani security forces are targeted by terrorists because they represent the central government. In fact, the goal of the TTP is to create an Islamic emirate on the Afghan model governed by sharia, Islamic law.