Authorities have closed all educational institutions across the county until at least the end of the week, following twin suicide bombings at an Islamic university on Tuesday.
By Wednesday, the death toll from the attacks at Islamabad’s International Islamic University had climbed to six. Twenty-nine others were wounded, said Naeem Iqbal of the Islamabad police. Watch more about the attacks Officials in the North West Frontier Province, Balochistan and Sindh shuttered their schools and colleges until Sunday. Educational institutions in Punjab will remained closed until further notice. The back-to-back explosions took place in the faculty area of the men’s section and in the women’s section cafeteria at the university. More than 12,000 foreign and local students, including 5,500 women, are enrolled in the 29-year-old university. The university Web site describes the school as a “unique center of learning in the Muslim world which strives to combine the essentials of the Islamic faith with the best of modern knowledge.” In recent weeks, Pakistan has been relentlessly rocked by suicide attacks as Islamic militants have retaliated against a military offensive to rout insurgents operating along the Pakistan-Afghan border. On Friday, a suicide car bomber detonated near a police station in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province. The blast killed at least 13 people, most of them civilians.
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A day earlier, militants attacked two police training centers and the country’s Federal Investigation Agency in Lahore in eastern Pakistan. At least 30 Pakistani police officers and civilians were killed in those attacks. At least 10 attackers also died. And on October 10, militants held dozens of hostages for 22 hours inside an army headquarters in Rawalpindi, which neighbors Islamabad. Eleven military personnel, three civilians, and nine militants were killed in the siege.
