Blast leaves Pakistani girl student, school employee injured

A bomb blast injured a girl student and an employee of a private school Saturday in Lakki Marwat district of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP), eyewitnesses and police said. A roadside bomb went off when the school bus, carrying students and staff to their homes after school closure at noon, reached Khesorwaal canal in Qazi Dheri area on Naurang-Manjiwala Road, witnesses said. According to reports reaching here from Lakki Marwat, the explosion broke the windowpanes of the bus, while class-I student Fareena Zaman and junior clerk Safdar sustained minor injuries. "The roadside bomb exploded a few hundred yards away from the Working Folks Grammar Higher Secondary School building," a local journalist said. A police official, however, said the bomb had been kept in a tractor trolley filled with of gravel/pebbles and went off when the trolley overturned on Naurang-Manjiwala Road. The official said the two persons were injured after they were hit by the gravel/pebbles. "The school bus was apparently the target," a school official said. "The scale of devastation would have been large if the bus had hit the device." He said the school had been set up with an aim to impart quality education to children. "Such coward acts cannot deviate us from the path we have chosen to deliver standard education to children in this backward district," he added. He said the staff would continue their curricular and co-curricular activities in the school as usual. Meanwhile, sources said the school administration had received threats and the institution being run by the NWFP Workers Welfare Board had also been attacked in the past. Meanwhile, volunteers have started joint patrolling with the personnel of law enforcement agencies in Naurang area to maintain peace during Ramadan, officials said Saturday. The youth, many of them educated and equipped with their own weapons, would carry out joint patrolling voluntarily with police personnel during the holy month. The joint patrolling will soon be launched in jurisdictions of other police stations, the sources said, adding the sub-divisional police officers and station house officers had been directed to compile the lists of volunteers in their respective areas on emergency basis. "Groups, each comprising about 100 volunteers, will be formed at police station levels for patrolling along with the police. The volunteers would be preferred to others during recruitment in the police department, provided they fulfil the basic criteria.