Eight people, including six teachers, were killed in two separate shootings in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday, authorities said.
There were no initial claims of responsibility for the attacks, which took place within a 6km radius of Kurram, the only Shia-majority town in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, near the Afghan border.
According to the police, both assaults had a sectarian undercurrent because Shia and Sunni Muslims in the area have a history of conflict.
In the first shooting, unidentified attackers targeted a moving vehicle, killing one Sunni schoolteacher and injuring another teacher, officials said.
Soon afterward, assailants entered the staff room of a nearby government-run school and opened fire there, killing five teachers and two construction workers.
Muhammad Imran, police officer in the Kurram district, said that the attackers killed them after identifying them as Shiite believers. No students were at the school at the time of the shootings.
Local rescue workers said they believe that both assaults were retaliatory, although it was unclear what was behind the initial attack. The police have not yet issued an official statement regarding the fatalities.
Azam Ali, a representative of the local government, said the attack on the school appeared to be a response to the assault on the car.
Both an Islamic State cell called ISIS-K and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, also known as the Pakistani Taliban, are known to operate in the region.
In recent months, the Taliban have increased their attacks on the police and military targets in the country’s northwest. The Pakistani Taliban has also attacked schools, killing 145 people – including 132 schoolchildren – at one in Peshawar in 2014.
After the shootings Thursday, the government postponed of the region’s upcoming school exams. Local hospitals began operating under emergency conditions, and all roads leading to Kurram were cordoned off, officials said.
The region has a history of sectarian violence, and Shiites have often been targeted. A suicide bombing at a Shia mosque in Parachinar, a town in the Kurram district, killed 24 people in 2017 and injured more than 70 others.
President Arif Alvi of Pakistan condemned the killing of the teaching staff. According to a statement from his office, Mr Alvi expressed the hope that the perpetrators would be apprehended and punished in accordance with the law.
Experts said that, so far, details of the attacks suggest they were part of a long-standing tribal rivalry that has sectarian dimensions.
“What’s especially concerning is that they come amid a resurgence of the very jihadist groups that fuelled a wave of sectarian-tribal conflict in the area over a decade ago,” said Arif Rafiq, president of Vizier Consulting, a political risk advisory company in New York.
“The Pakistani state is able to manage intertribal disputes,” he said. “But if the TTP and other Sunni jihadist groups step into the mix, that raises the risk that we could see something akin to the previous wave of sectarian violence.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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