Category: Terrorism

All five young men whose bodies were found dumped in Turbat on Saturday were close friends and belonged to Punjab’s Gujrat district.

According to Express News, the bodies of all the victims were shifted from Karachi to Lahore through a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight. The victims’ relatives and CCPO received the bodies at the Allama Iqbal International airport where moving scenes were witnessed. The bodies were later moved to their ancestral village in Gujrat.

Four of the victims identified as Usman Qadir, Danish Ali, Saqib and Qasim were residents of Khori Rasool Pur village while Badar Munir was a resident of Jalalpur Jattan. All the victims can be seen in a selfie which has lately surfaced on social media. According to sources, they were illegal immigrants who wanted to sneak into Iran en route to Europe.

No group has so far claimed responsibility for the massacre, though the banned Baloch Liberation Front (BLF) of Dr Allah Nazar had claimed credit for the November 15 killings in which 15 young men were shot dead execution-style in the same district of the volatile Balochistan province.

Human smuggling is a huge business in Pakistan and other South Asian countries.

The recent mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, raises familiar questions—and myths—about guns in America.

Hey, good morning. The Giants looked terrible, didn’t they? One more Russian connection turned up in the Trump Cabinet—Oh, what’s that? A gun massacre in Texas? Oh, was it a terrorist attack? How many dead? Twenty, they’re saying! Now it’s more than twenty? Twenty-six dead and twenty wounded. In a church, too, small children ripped apart. Who did it? A man with a history of domestic abuse, wearing a ballistic vest, and using an assault-type rifle. Yes, that’s real enough. That one counts as a massacre.

Some version of this numbed dialogue—or internal monologue—must have gone on in countless American kitchens this morning. We have become so inured to gun massacres that the numbers must be insanely large, the victims unimaginably helpless, before it even quite registers as an event. Charles Whitman, the sniper who killed people from the University of Texas at Austin clock tower, in 1966, and in some ways inaugurated the modern American gun massacre—whose chief note is the random slaughter of unknown people by a gunman gripped by a vague and nameless rage—was thought to have done something unimaginable at the time. He killed sixteen people that day.

Feelings of powerlessness and depression are bound to infect those—by all surveys, the majority of Americans—who would like to see something done to prevent these increasingly common occurrences of mass slaughter. It’s hard to be hopeful. If nothing was done after the killing of twenty school children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, and if nothing was done—not even the “bump stock” limitation—after the murder of fifty-eight concertgoers from a sniper’s perch in Las Vegas, a month ago, then twenty-six more dead won’t alter things. But there is never a time to give way to hopelessness: the politics are hard but far from insurmountable, and, meanwhile, as with every public crisis, the truth matters and clarifies and brings light, even when the light can’t immediately show a better path forward. If we can’t defeat the gun lobby now, we can out-argue it, and expose it. Here are some myths that are trotted out regularly by that lobby, and that will likely be trotted out again today.

1. The kinds of rules and limitations most often proposed—i.e., a ban on military-style weapons of the kind used in the two most recent high-profile gun massacres and in so many others before—wouldn’t have an effect on gun violence in America, which tends to be concentrated on handguns, and more typically involves suicides and domestic disputes. Gun massacres are not the only or even the most lethal form of gun violence.
Nor are measles the only or the worst form of infectious disease, but vaccinating against them raises the level of public health generally and makes the next advance more likely. Making one kind of gun illegal or restricted makes the broader work of restricting violence more plausible. (Which is, of course, exactly why the National Rifle Association, et al., oppose it.) Most reforms in the long history of human progress were initially deprecated as being too small or too soon or not enough—yet a small reform emboldens people to think in new ways about their condition and the possibility of remedying it. All public-health measures seem at first inadequate to the public miseries they attempt to cure. Each step forward—each public sewer built, each antibiotic discovered—clears the way for more.

2. Why, if there are too many guns in America, is there less crime than there used to be? People keep buying guns and the crime rate keeps going down. Doesn’t that prove that the more guns there are, the less crime there will be?

Well, no—the crime rate, contrary to the picture of carnage that Donald Trump likes to frighten his voters with, has been going down over the past decades in every Western country, in the suburbs of Ottawa as well as in the streets of Manhattan. (There does seem to have been a recent uptick in homicides in American cities, but it is only a blip on the much larger picture of a dramatic fall.) The only question worth asking is why, given that crime has declined so universally, does America still have such a uniquely highly level of gun violence? Crime rates descend, gun massacres increase. That’s the “Why” to ask and answer.

Along with this argument goes, most often, a disdainful rejection of common sense and science, one rooted in the idea of guns as symbolic objects. You’ve confused an M4 with selective fire with an AR-15 with a Slide Fire modification—or whatever the current detail may be. How can you talk about gun control when you don’t know the difference between a machine gun and a semiautomatic? Thirteen-year-olds in love with their guitars display similar indignation when someone confuses a Stratocaster with a Telecaster. This says something about the psychology of the gun obsessed, but nothing about the nature or the sources of mass violence.

3. Given the number of weapons of mass murder already in place in the country, any change we can make, any law we might pass—even if we could pass such laws—will be inadequate to the problem. And, anyway,, any particular proposal being debated wouldn’t have stopped this or that massacre, whose perpetrator would have escaped its rules.
This misunderstands the nature and power of civic reform. As the social scientist Franklin Zimring has shown repeatedly, we didn’t need to build, so to speak, a twelve-foot barrier separating the criminal from his crime in order to see crime decrease—we built a series of smaller obstacles, which ended by producing dramatic results. Nor does social reform work by tailoring legislation to the precise shape of the previous harm. Gun control in any form will limit gun violence. Child labor was a terrible thing, and small boys forced to become chimney sweeps was among the worst of it. But if we want to abolish child labor, we don’t put lids on chimneys. We abolish it more broadly, and know that the specific abuse will likely end, too.

4. The Second Amendment.
In a piece that I wrote after the gun massacre in Las Vegas, I suggested that we end a truce over the Second Amendment—meaning not that we should go to war with the Second Amendment, but that the willingness of people who are concerned by the larger emergencies posed by the Trump Administration to defer arguing over the Second Amendment seems ill-founded. The reason that we have no need to declare a truce “with” the Second Amendment is that the Second Amendment was clearly originally intended to do the work of regulating guns. The argument that the Second Amendment remains a formidable obstacle in the way of gun control, even if there were a political will to pass such legislation, is perhaps the most frustrating of the objections. Only a recent, radical, and bizarre rereading found in it an individual right to gun ownership. The decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, in 2008, which featured Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s invention of a previously undiscovered right to private gun ownership, was 5–4. Had Obama appointed the Supreme Court Justice whom he had been elected to appoint, the voting pattern on the Court would have tipped, and almost certainly reason would have been restored on this interpretation. Once again, I urge everyone to read the (Republican-appointed) Justice John Paul Stevens’s great and bewildered dissent on the ruling, which inserted an individual right to gun ownership into the fabric of constitutional law. In truth, no kind of gun regulation involving individuals would be unconstitutional given the long-decided meaning of the Amendment.

5. The social science on gun violence is inconclusive.
It will always be a given that it’s impossible to have real controlled experiments. The closest thing in this case would be to have two contiguous countries—both with similar “root” populations, and both subject to massive immigration from abroad. Both would have a frightening number of mentally ill people capable of mass killing. One, however, would have reasonable gun-control laws regularly reinforced, in the light of new kinds of violence—with guns broadly available for recreation and pest control, but the kinds capable of killing many people quickly prohibited or highly restricted. The country on the other side of the border would impose few gun-control measures. Then we would compare the results. One country—let’s call it Kanada—would have a per-capita rate of gun homicide seven times smaller than the other country. That experiment’s been run. The results are in. We really do know. Now we only have to do.

New York, Oct 31: A driver plowed a pickup truck down a crowded bike path along the Hudson River in Manhattan on Tuesday, killing eight people and injuring 11 before being shot by a police officer in what officials are calling the deadliest terrorist attack on New York City since Sept. 11, 2001.

The rampage ended when the motorist — whom the police identified as Sayfullo Saipov, 29 — smashed into a school bus, jumped out of his truck and ran up and down the highway waving a pellet gun and paintball gun and shouting “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before he was shot in the abdomen by the officer. He remained in critical condition on Tuesday evening.

Mayor Bill de Blasio declared the incident a terrorist attack and federal law enforcement authorities were leading the investigation. Investigators discovered handwritten notes in Arabic near the truck that indicated allegiance to ISIS, two law enforcement officials said. But investigators had not uncovered evidence of any direct or enabling ties between Mr. Saipov and ISIS and were treating the episode as a case of an “inspired” attacker, two counterterrorism officials said.

Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference, “Based on information we have at this moment, this was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians.”

The names of the victims had not been released by 9 p.m. Tuesday. The Belgian and Argentinian governments said their citizens were among the victims.

Mr. Saipov came to the United States from Uzbekistan in 2010, and had a green card that allowed permanent legal residence. He had apparently lived in Paterson, N.J., and Tampa, Fla. An official said he rented the truck from a Home Depot in New Jersey.

The truck came crashing to a stop near the corner of Chambers and West Streets by Stuyvesant High School. Sirus Minovi, 14, a freshman there who was hanging out with friends, said people scattered.

“We heard people screaming, ‘gun’ ‘shooter’ and ‘run away,’” Mr. Minovi said. “We thought it was a Halloween prank.”

He realized it was not a joke when he saw the man staggering through the intersection, waving guns and screaming words he could not make out. A passer-by approached the attacker, apparently trying to calm him, Mr. Minovi said, until the man realized the attacker had a gun. The man “put his hands up and was backing away,” Mr. Minovi said.

Almost immediately, as investigators began to look into Mr. Saipov’s history, it became clear that he had been on the radar of federal authorities. Three officials said he had come to the federal authorities’ attention as a result of an unrelated investigation, but it was not clear whether that was because he was a friend, an associate or a family member of someone under scrutiny or because he himself had been the focus of an investigation.

Over the last two years, a terrorism investigation by the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security, the New York Police Department and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn resulted in charges against five men from Uzbekistan and one from Kazakhstan for providing material support to ISIS. Several of the men have pleaded guilty. It is unclear whether Mr. Saipov was connected with that investigation.

Martin Feely, a spokesman for the New York F.B.I. office, declined to comment on whether Mr. Saipov was known to the bureau.

F.B.I. agents were expected to search Mr. Saipov’s home in Paterson, N.J., and his car on Tuesday night, a law enforcement official said. A phone, which was recovered at the scene of the attack, also would be searched, another official said.

The attack unfolded as nearby schools were letting out on a crisp Halloween afternoon. It ended five blocks north of the World Trade Center. The driver left a roughly mile-long crime scene: a tree-lined bike path strewn with bodies, mangled bicycles and bicycle parts, from wheels twisted like pretzels to a dislodged seat.

Mr. Saipov, a slim, bearded man, was seen in videos running through traffic after the attack with a paintball gun in one hand and a pellet gun in the other. Six people died at the scene and two others died at a hospital, officials said. The authorities credited the officer who shot him with saving lives.

“He was Johnny-on-the-spot and he takes the guy down,” a city official said.

Coming five months after a car rammed into pedestrians in Times Square, killing one, Tuesday’s attack again highlighted the danger of a car attack on busy city streets. The Times Square incident was not a terrorist attack. But both incidents brought to mind the terrorist attack last year in Nice, France, in which a cargo truck killed scores of people celebrating Bastille Day.

The episodes also evoked calls from terrorist magazines, including in a recent edition of Rumiyah, a magazine used by ISIS, for attackers to mow down pedestrians with trucks, continue the attacks with a knife or a gun and claim credit by shouting or leaving leaflets.

Students in Halloween costumes streamed out of nearby schools after lockdowns were lifted and huddled with parents. Their faces, once painted for the holiday, were streaked with tears.

Emily, 12, a seventh-grader at I.S. 289 whose father asked that her last name not be printed, had been walking on her usual route home when other students turned and ran in the other direction.

“All the kids were screaming, ‘Run!’, ‘Gun!’ ‘Run inside,’” she said, still wearing cat ears. She said mothers pushing strollers and children in costumes ran in a herd back toward the school.

President Trump responded to the attack on Twitter: “In NYC, looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person. Law enforcement is following this closely. NOT IN THE U.S.A.!”

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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo cautioned at a news conference, “There’s no evidence that suggests a wider plot or a wider scheme.” In the aftermath, city and state law enforcement agencies increased security at high-profile locations.
Terrorism analysts noted that on Monday a French pro-ISIS media unit, known as the Centre Mediatique An-Nur, put out a specific threat for Halloween, mentioning the date on a banner spread on the encrypted app Telegram and on ISIS-affiliated Twitter accounts.
In chat rooms with ISIS followers, supporters cheered the Tuesday’s attack. At the same time, ISIS members were trying to discern if the attacker was one of their supporters.
The Islamic State’s official media outlets made no mention of the violence in Manhattan. In the past, the terrorist group has generally not claimed attacks when the perpetrator is in custody, as was the case in the Manhattan truck attack.
Mr. Saipov wove a deadly path on a stretch usually bustling with commuters, runners and cyclists, drawn by the downtown offices nearby or the shimmering river.
He turned onto the bike path alongside the West Side Highway at Houston Street just after 3 p.m. and sped south, striking numerous pedestrians and cyclists, many of them in the back, the authorities said. People scattered and dove to the asphalt.
The truck, labeled with a sign saying, “Rent me starting at $19,” rammed into the bus near Chambers Street. The bus serves two schools in Lower Manhattan and transports students with special needs. Two adults and two children on the bus were injured, the authorities said.
Mr. Saipov jumped out of the truck before a uniformed officer assigned to the city’s First Precinct shot him, Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill said. The police said they were not looking for additional suspects.
Officials said the 11 people were taken to nearby hospitals with serious, but not life-threatening, injuries.
Rukmini Callimachi, Jim Dwyer, Luis A. Ferre Sadurni, J. David Goodman, Adam Goldman, Alexandra S. Levine and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting

At least 20 people, including a police constable, were killed and more than 30 injured in a suicide bombing on Thursday at Dargah Pir Rakhel Shah in Fatehpur, a small town in the Jhal Magsi district of Balochistan, DawnNews reported.

District Chairman Jhal Magsi, Aurangzaib Magsi confirmed the death toll late in the night.
The deputy commissioner of Jhal Magsi had earlier said that the deceased include at least three children.
The medical superintendent of Gandawah Hospital, Dr Rukhsana Magsi, had earlier said 15 dead bodies were brought to the facility.

She said that another 24 injured were brought to District Headquarters Hospital Gandawah, of which 18 were shifted to Quetta and Larkana for medical treatment.

The governments of Sindh and Balochistan worked closely to rehabilitate those injured in the attack. Jhal Magsi is close to Balochistan’s border with Sindh and better connected to larger cities like Jacobabad in the latter province.

The explosion, which police attributed to a suicide bomber, took place at the entrance to the dargah at a time when scores of people had gathered to pay their respects. Thursdays are usually busy in terms of attendance at shrines as the day is considered spiritually significant, but the day was also significant for the dargah as it was hosting a bi-monthly event.

Jhal Magsi is located at a three-hour drive from Jacobabad and Larkana.

District Police Officer Mohammad Iqbal said the bomber had tried to enter the shrine but a security guard stopped him, after which the attacker detonated his explosives.

Initial reports suggested that the explosion took place when the dhamaal — a devotional dance performed at shrines — was being performed after evening prayers.

Balochistan Home Minister Sarfaraz Bugti told DawnNews that “if he [the attacker] had managed to enter the dargah, the death toll would have been much higher.”

Answering a question on whether the government was aware of a terrorist threat, Bugti said, “We are in a war zone. We [share] a porous border with Afghanistan. Keeping all these factors in mind, our security forces ensured a peaceful Moharram and they will continue to fight terrorism in Balochistan.”

The injured were initially transferred to District Headquarters Hospital.

The attack happened hours after the chief of the military’s media wing highlighted the army’s efforts in combating terrorism across the country and brought up the role of “non-state actors” that the army believes are being sponsored by enemy spy agencies.

It was the second deadly attack on a shrine in Pakistan in 2017. In February this year, a suicide bomber had killed more than 80 people and injured more than 250 in an attack targeting the busy Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in Sehwan, Sindh.

The army had launched the ongoing Operation Raddul Fasaad in response to the Sehwan bombing, saying it was aiming at eliminating the “residual/latent threat of terrorism”.

This was also the second attack on the Pir Rakhel Shah shrine since 2005. On March 19, 2005, at least 35 people were killed and many injured when a suicide bomber exploded himself at the shrine. The dead had included devotees from different sects who frequented the shrine seeking spiritual relief.

Pir Rakhel Shah
According to a blog maintained by the shrine’s administrators, Sufi Rakhel Shah was born in 1852 AD in the district of Mirpur, Balochistan. His father, Noor Shah, claimed descent from Hazrat Ali. His eldest brother, Sufi Abdul Nabi Shah, was a disciple of Fakir Jaanullah Shah, a devotee of Sufi Innayatullah Shah.

Rakhel Shah, who is said to have been influenced by his brother’s spiritual way of life, was for a time a disciple of Sufi Abdul Sattar of Dargah Jhoke Sharif, which is located in lower Sindh. After spending some time there, Rakhel Shah returned to Fatehpur to live a life of asceticism and charity.

The shrine was built in his devotion.

The rapid-fire popping sounded like firecrackers at first, and many in the crowd of 22,000 country music fans didn’t understand what was happening when the band stopped playing and singer Jason Aldean bolted off the stage.

“That’s gunshots,” a man could be heard saying emphatically on a cellphone video in the nearly half-minute of silence and confusion that followed. A woman pleaded with others: “Get down! Get down! Stay down!”

Then the bam-bam-bam sounds resumed. And pure terror set in.
“People start screaming and yelling and we start running,” said Andrew Akiyoshi, who provided the cell phone video to The Associated Press. “You could feel the panic. You could feel like the bullets were flying above us. Everybody’s ducking down, running low to the ground.”

While some concertgoers hit the ground, others pushed for the crowded exits, shoving through narrow gates and climbing over fences as 40- to 50-round bursts of what was believed to be automatic weapons fire rained down on them from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino hotel.

By Monday afternoon, 59 victims were dead and 527 wounded in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

“You just didn’t know what to do,” Akiyoshi said. “Your heart is racing and you’re thinking, ‘I’m going to die.'”

The gunman, identified as Stephen Craig Paddock, a 64-year-old retired accountant from Mesquite, Nevada, killed himself before officers stormed Room 135 in the gold-colored glass skyscraper. He had been staying there since Thursday and had busted out windows to create his sniper’s perch, roughly 500 yards from the concert grounds.
The motive for the attack remained a mystery, with Sheriff Joseph Lombardo saying: “I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath at this point.”
Paddock had 16 guns in his hotel room, including rifles with scopes, Lombardo said. Two were modified to make them fully automatic, according to two U.S. officials briefed by law enforcement who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still unfolding.
At Paddock’s home, authorities found 18 more guns, explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Also, several pounds of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that has been used to make explosives, were in his car, the sheriff said.

The FBI said it found nothing so far to suggest the attack was connected to international terrorism, despite a claim of responsibility from the Islamic State group, which said Paddock was a “soldier” who had recently converted to Islam.

In an address to the country, President Donald Trump called the bloodbath “an act of pure evil” and added: “In moments of tragedy and horror, America comes together as one. And it always has.” He ordered flags flown at half-staff.

With hospitals jammed with victims, authorities put out a call for blood donations and set up a hotline to report missing people and speed the identification of the dead and wounded. They also opened a “family reunification center” for people to find loved ones.

More than 12 hours after the massacre, bodies covered in white sheets were still being removed from the festival grounds.

The shooting began at 10:08 p.m., and the gunman appeared to fire unhindered for more than 10 minutes, according to radio traffic. Police frantically tried to locate him and determine whether the gunfire was coming from Mandalay Bay or the neighboring Luxor hotel.

At 10:14 p.m., an officer said on his radio that he was pinned down against a wall on Las Vegas Boulevard with 40 to 50 people.

“We can’t worry about the victims,” an officer said at 10:15 p.m. “We need to stop the shooter before we have more victims. Anybody have eyes on him … stop the shooter.”

Near the stage, Dylan Schneider, a country singer who performed earlier in the day, huddled with others under the VIP bleachers, where he turned to his manager and asked, “Dude, what do we do?” He said he repeated the question again and again over the next five minutes.

Bodies were laid out on the artificial turf installed in front of the stage, and people were screaming and crying. The sound of people running on the bleachers added to the confusion, and Schneider thought the concert was being invaded with multiple shooters.

“No one knew what to do,” Schneider said. “It’s literally running for life and you don’t know what decision is the right one. But like I said, I knew we had to get out of there.”

He eventually pushed his way out of the crowd and found refuge in the nearby Tropicana hotel-casino, where he kicked in a door to an engineering room and spent hours there with others who followed him.
The shooting had begun as Aldean closed out the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival. He had just opened the song “When She Says Baby” and the first burst of nearly 50 shots crackled as he sang, “It’s tough just getting up.”

Muzzle flashes could be seen in the dark as the gunman fired away.
“It was the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” said Kodiak Yazzie, 36. “You could hear that the noise was coming from west of us, from Mandalay Bay. You could see a flash, flash, flash, flash.”

The crowd, funneled tightly into a wide-open space, had little cover and no easy way to escape. Victims fell to the ground, while others fled in panic. Some hid behind concession stands or crawled under parked cars.
Faces were etched with shock and confusion, and people wept and screamed.

Tales of heroism and compassion emerged quickly: Couples held hands as they ran through the dirt lot. Some of the bleeding were carried out by fellow concertgoers. While dozens of ambulances took away the wounded, while some people loaded victims into their cars and drove them to the hospital. People fleeing the concert grounds hitched rides with strangers, piling into cars and trucks.

Some of the injured were hit by shrapnel. Others were trampled or were injured jumping fences.

The dead included at least three off-duty police officers from various departments who were attending the concert, authorities said. Two on-duty officers were wounded, one critically, police said.

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman said the attack was the work of a “crazed lunatic full of hate.”
The sheriff said authorities believe Paddock acted alone. While Paddock appeared to have no criminal history, his father was a bank robber who was on the FBI’s most-wanted list in the 1960s.

As for why Paddock went on the murderous rampage, his brother in Florida, Eric Paddock, told reporters: “I can’t even make something up. There’s just nothing.”

Hours after the shooting, Aldean posted on Instagram that he and his crew were safe and that the shooting was “beyond horrific.”

“It hurts my heart that this would happen to anyone who was just coming out to enjoy what should have been a fun night,” the country star said.
Before Sunday, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history took place in June 2016, when a gunman who professed support for Muslim extremist groups opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people.

A suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killed 22 people in May. Almost 90 people were killed in 2015 at a concert in Paris by gunmen inspired by the Islamic State.

Brian Melley in Los Angeles; Brian Skoloff in Las Vegas; Sadie Gurman and Tami Abdollah in Washington; and Kristin M. Hall in Nashville, Tenn., and Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2017, Chicago Tribune

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide bomber riding a motorcycle rammed into a military truck near a busy bus station in southwestern Pakistan, killing at least 15 people, including eight soldiers, and wounding at least 40 others, military officials said on Sunday.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack on Saturday in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province in the southwest. A military spokesman said the attack had been aimed at sabotaging Independence Day celebrations, as Pakistan will mark its 70th anniversary on Monday.

Active-duty troops in the Pakistani Army have rarely come under attack in Quetta, although paramilitary forces and police officers have repeatedly faced assaults by militants in the city.

The explosion, which was heard far away and set off a fire that engulfed vehicles nearby, left several people critically injured. The wounded were taken to Civil Hospital and Combined Military Hospital.

The attack, near several important government and private buildings — including the provincial assembly — renewed concerns about security arrangements in the city, which has long reeled under militant and sectarian violence despite the heavy presence of security forces and paramilitary soldiers.

Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, the Pakistani army chief, arrived in the city on Sunday morning to chair a high-level security briefing and visit the wounded at the military hospital, officials said. The interior minister, Ahsan Iqbal, had also traveled to the provincial capital on Saturday for meetings with senior civil and military officials.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has claimed to be behind several terrorist attacks in the province, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, in recent months.

Pakistani officials, however, played down the presence of the Islamic State in the province, asserting that the group does not have an organized presence there.

China has expressed “grave concern” over reports that ISIS has killed two Chinese teachers kidnapped in Pakistan.
The man and woman, said by Chinese media to be a couple, were kidnapped by armed men on May 24 from the city of Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province, on May 24 on their way to teach a Chinese language class, a senior security officer told CNN last month.

Amaq, a news agency affiliated with ISIS, said Thursday that Islamic State fighters had killed two Chinese teachers who were being held in the Mastung, Balochistan. The group also released a video, which showed two bodies shot and bleeding on some grassy ground.

“China resolutely opposes all forms of kidnapping of civilians and opposes all forms of terrorism and extreme acts of violence,” said Hua Chunying, the spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, in a statement on Friday.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was “working to confirm authenticity of the reports of killing of two Chinese nationals, kidnapped in Quetta.”

The deaths underscore the risks of China’s growing international reach and influence. The Global Times, a state-run tabloid, said that guarding Chinese nationals overseas had become a new and serious challenge for national security.

“As China’s international influence is growing, terrorist organizations target Chinese for ransom or just to create a sensation. Cases of Chinese being kidnapped have increased,” the paper said in an editorial.

Chinese nationals have settled in Pakistan in greater numbers since the announcement of a $46 billion investment plan known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in 2015 — part of China’s One Belt One Road initiative.

“Given Pakistan’s complex security situation, both sides need to study and formulate a more comprehensive security plan to fully cover Chinese in Pakistan,” the Global Times added.

Rescue attempt
Hua said authorities had been trying to rescue the hostages.

Pakistan’s military said Thursday that its security forces conducted an operation from June 1 to 3 in Mastung, where it said it killed 12 terrorists with links to ISIS that had been hiding in caves but didn’t mention the abducted Chinese teachers.
Balochistan is home to the Gwador Port Complex, a flagship project of the economic corridor, but has been plagued by violence by different militant groups including the Pakistani Taliban and a separatist movement.

Pakistan views CPEC, a combination of infrastructure projects ranging from road networks, a fiber optic cable project, railway lines, a deep-sea port, coal mines and solar farms, as a huge opportunity to develop its economy.

Pakistan is home to roughly 20,000 Chinese, according to Mustafa Hyder, chief executive of the Pakistan-China Institute.

CNN’s Serenitie Wang and Yuli Yang contributed to this report

London, June 4: The death toll has risen to seven with a further 48 injured following last night’s terror attack in central London, the second major act of terrorism to strike the United Kingdom in less than two weeks.
The attack began late Saturday night, when a white van swerved into crowds of pedestrians on London Bridge, leaving bodies lying in the roadway, according to witness reports. At least one pedestrian is thought to have jumped into the Thames to escape being hit.

The suspects are then believed to have exited the van and proceeded on foot towards the nearby area of Borough Market, one of the capital’s most popular nightlife spots.

Eyewitnesses spoke of abject panic as three men armed with “foot-long” knives burst into packed restaurants and cafes, slashing at those inside indiscriminately. Many customers fought off the attackers, using chairs, pint glasses and bottles. Others hid behind tables and inside bathrooms or attempted to flee.

In total, the marauding attack lasted approximately eight minutes, according to police, who shot dead all three known suspects at the scene. At least one of the suspects appeared to be wearing a suicide bomb vest, though this was later confirmed by police to be a hoax.

The London Ambulance Service, who dispatched upwards of 80 medics to help deal with the incident, said at least 48 people were taken to five hospitals across the capital, with many more treated at the scene. French and Australian nationals have been confirmed by their respective governments as among those affected.

A police officer who was responding to the attack on London Bridge was also stabbed. The officer received serious but not life-threatening injuries, according to an official police statement.

Heightened state of terror
The third terrorist attack to have occurred in the UK this year and the second in London, Saturday’s attack will renew the debate around the safety of the capital in light of the increased terror threat.

In a press conference Sunday morning, London Mayor Sadiq Khan praised the quick police response and asked Londoners to remain calm and vigilant. This is the second time Khan has addressed the public in response to a terror attack since becoming mayor, and he repeated his previous insistence that London remains one of the safest global cities in the world.

“We will not be cowered by terrorism and we will not let them win,” said Khan, who promised an increased police presence throughout the capital in the coming days.

For many in London, Saturday’s attack will be a grim reminder of the events on Westminster Bridge on March 22, when Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians, killing four and injuring 50, before stabbing a police officer to death at the entrance to parliament. The attacker — who reportedly had a criminal record and may have had connections to violent extremism — was gunned down by a police officer.

Khan is expected to join British Prime Minister Theresa May at an emergency meeting of Cobra — the UK’s emergency crisis committee — Sunday in response to the attack. May had earlier labeled the attack as “terrible incident.”

Aiming at the people
The attack began just after 10 p.m. local time on London Bridge, just north of an area famed for its cafes and bars, and near the London Bridge rail and underground interchange.

Witness Mark Roberts, who was on the bridge at the time of the attack, told CNN the van was traveling south across the River Thames at a speed and was swerving as it struck several people, knocking one person “about 20 feet into the air.”

The van swerved into oncoming lanes before hitting a bus stop and coming to a stop, Roberts said.

“Within my line of sight, there were five or six people on the ground that were not moving,” he said. “It looked to me that the van was aiming at the people.”
Roberts said he heard what sounded like gunshots about 10 minutes later. He estimated 100 people were on the bridge at the time, fewer than earlier in the night because it was getting late.

“I froze, to be honest,” Roberts said. “As I was thinking … which direction should I run, the van swerved across the other side of the bridge from me.”

Restaurant panic
Witnesses at the Elliot restaurant in Borough Market described seeing large groups of people running up the street — as it became apparent an attack was underway.

“Someone said, ‘What is going on?’ and one of the people running said, ‘There is a man with a knife up there and he is coming this way.’ There was complete panic as everyone ran to the back of the restaurant and crouched down trying to hide themselves from view,” one witness told CNN.

“A man suddenly appeared in the restaurant with a massive knife … (he) stabbed a waitress, who was hiding behind a partition, in the neck and stabbed a man in the back before running out of the restaurant,” the witness added.

Another witness said a masked man entered the nearby El Pastor restaurant and slashed a woman in the side with a knife.

Jack Applebee, who owns a restaurant one block away from Elliot’s restaurant, said he was standing outside when people came running down the street. A girl said, “They’re stabbing everyone.”

Applebee told his customers to go to the back of the restaurant. He said he started to pull down his shutters and turned around to see three men standing outside, one holding a machete.

The men just looked at the people in the restaurant said Applebee, who at that point was unsure what to do. After a brief pause, the men continued down the street, at which point Applebee and a colleague pulled down the shutters. Five minutes later they heard gunshots.

About 90 minutes later, police evacuated the restaurant, he said.

Police activity spread throughout the Borough Market area. Officers rushed into the nearby Katzenjammers bar and ordered people to sit on the floor, patron Paul Connell told CNN.

“The police were absolutely brilliant, they came in and explained the situation,” said Connell. ” Armed police came in. They told us to remain on the floor but to stay calm. We were eventually led out of the bar and some kind people working in a hotel let us come in to use the bathroom and to give us water.”

Official reaction
During a press conference in the early hours of Sunday morning, the UK’s most senior counter terrorism officer, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations, Mark Rowley, praised efforts by police in confronting the attack: “At 22:08 yesterday evening we began to receive reports that a vehicle had struck pedestrians on London Bridge. The vehicle continued to drive from London Bridge to Borough Market.”

“Armed officers responded very quickly and bravely, confronting three male suspects who were shot and killed in Borough Market. The suspects had been confronted and shot by the police within eight minutes of the first call.”
England has been on edge since May 22, when a suicide bomber killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena.

A benefit concert for victims of that attack was scheduled for Sunday in Manchester. On Saturday, the singer tweeted, “Praying for London.”

CNN’s Steve Almasy, Ralph Ellis, Natalie Gallon, Alex Felton, Carol Jordan, Matt Wells, Antonia Mortensen, Paul P. Murphy and Donie O’Sullivan contributed to this report.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A truck bombing near the Afghan presidential palace early Wednesday killed at least 80 people and wounded hundreds, officials said. The death toll seemed certain to rise, and the attack appeared to be one of the bloodiest of the long Afghan war
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The huge blast during the morning rush hour caused panic in much of central Kabul, shattering windows as far as a mile away. Nearly two hours after the explosion near Zanbaq Square, a crowded area in the capital that leads to the presidential palace as well as major foreign embassies, plumes of smoke were still rising from the scene.

At a time when the United States is weighing sending more troops to Afghanistan to try to halt the government’s losses, the attack on Wednesday highlighted the continued ability of militants to strike even in the most secure parts of the capital. And outside the country’s main cities, the Taliban have rapidly been seizing territory and have kept the Afghan security forces badly bloodied and on the defensive.

At a news conference in Kabul, Gen. Murad Ali Murad, the deputy interior minister, said that more than 80 people had been killed and 463 wounded.

Kabul’s police chief, Gen. Hassan Shah Frogh, said the explosives used in the blast had been in a tanker truck used to empty septic tanks. The bomb was detonated near the square just as the street turns toward the German Embassy, he said. “The blast was so huge that it dug a big crater as deep as four meters,” or 13 feet, General Frogh said.

The German Embassy was extensively damaged, with dozens of windows blown in, the public broadcaster ARD reported. It broadcast images showing stunned civilians pressing makeshift bandages to bloody limbs, stumbling through a smoke-filled street as ambulances rushed to the scene, their sirens blaring.

Germany’s foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said that an Afghan security guard employed by the embassy had been killed. He also said that several Germans had been wounded, without providing details. He condemned what he called an attack on “those who are in Afghanistan working with the people there for a better future.”
“To target these people is especially despicable,” Mr. Gabriel said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, and it was unclear whether the embassy had been specifically targeted. A spokesman for the Taliban, whose forces are responsible for most of the intensifying violence across Afghanistan, insisted that they were not behind the attack and condemned the toll on civilians.
But even that was no sure indication of who might be responsible. In recent years, the Taliban have frequently denied responsibility for attacks that intelligence officials believe the insurgents actually did commit. And militants loyal to the Islamic State have staged more attacks in recent months, though they have been smaller.

In Germany, the blast was sure to fuel a debate over the government’s efforts to repatriate Afghans whose applications for asylum have been rejected. About 1,000 German soldiers are stationed in Afghanistan as part of the NATO force, and Germany has invested billions in military and aid to stabilize the country.

German officials have been at pains to insist that parts of Afghanistan are safe, despite an overall security situation that the interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, has described as “complicated.” Hours after the blast, the government in Berlin said that a flight carrying deportees bound for Afghanistan scheduled for Wednesday had been postponed, citing logistical reasons for embassy employees on the ground.

President Ashraf Ghani called the attack “a crime against humanity.” A statement by Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan, applauded the Afghan security forces for preventing the truck full of explosives from entering the Green Zone, a reference to the area that houses the headquarters of the coalition forces as well as several foreign embassies.

“The attack demonstrates a complete disregard for civilians and reveals the barbaric nature of the enemy faced by the Afghan people,” the statement said.

Pictures from the scene showed smoke and chaos, with bloodied people on the ground as emergency personnel tried to evacuate victims. Video footage that witnesses filmed immediately after the blast showed vast destruction to the buildings in the area and people stuck in destroyed vehicles amid flames.

There was a heavy security presence, including forces from the United States-led coalition, and helicopters circled overhead. Dozens of people waited outside the large security cordon for news of their loved ones.

Emotions were running high among the Afghan security forces at the scene. Intelligence officers closely checked the paperwork of emergency workers shuttling between the blast site and the hospitals, fearing that they might have been infiltrated by militants planning a follow-up attack.

At one point, after a senior police official tried to pass the cordon with a large entourage of guards, a scuffle broke out, and the police officers and intelligence officers cocked their weapons at one another. But the situation was quickly defused.
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The sheer force of the blast was staggering, though it was not unprecedented. In 2015, a similar truck bombing in the Shah Shaheed neighborhood of the city also caused hundreds of casualties and left a strip of shops leveled and houses in a wide radius damaged. Other large truck bombings have targeted the offices of an elite force that provides security to senior government officials, as well as a compound for Western contractors.

Shopkeepers as far as a mile from the scene of Wednesday’s blast were sweeping glass from shattered windows, as parents arrived to escort panicking children home from school.

“There was a big tremble, and then we heard a massive explosion,” said Ramin Sangar, a cameraman at a television channel near the site of the explosion, as he was loaded into an ambulance. “All the windows are broken. Our studios collapsed.”

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Most of the victims appeared to be civilians on their way to work during the morning rush hour. A BBC driver, Mohammed Nazir, as well as Aziz Navin, an information technology worker for the Afghan television channel ToloNews, were among those killed.

Lotfullah Najafizada, the director of ToloNews, described a painful search for his colleague’s remains. He and his co-workers examined seven mostly unrecognizable bodies at the military hospital before heading over the civilian side, where the 44th body had just arrived.

“We found Aziz in a large, dirt-colored sack, and his relatives were trying to transport him home,” Mr. Najafizada wrote on Facebook. “The ambulances were busy, and Aziz waited in the hall of the hospital for his final trip home.”

Crowds were building throughout the day outside the main hospitals in Kabul as people searched for their loved ones among the wounded or dead.

More than 300 people anxiously waited outside the Emergency Hospital, one of the main trauma centers in the city. Some were weeping and wailing, while others were trying to look up names of loved ones on the lists that employees handed out. Inside the hospital, where the windows had also been shattered by the force of the blast, doctors were attending to dozens of wounded.

Outside Wazir Akbar Khan, the main government hospital, a white-bearded man in his 60s named Azizullah searched for news of his 22-year-old son, Abdullah, who worked at a telecommunications company near the site of the blast.

“I searched all hospitals. He is nowhere,” said Mr. Azizullah, who would crouch and then get up to pace. “Abdullah has two children, a wife and an old mother. What will I tell them?”

Mr. Azizullah received a call from someone who appeared to be inside the hospital, telling him about unrecognizable bodies.

“Can you search the person whose body is cut up?” he asked the caller. “He may be my son. Try to find his documents.”

Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and Melissa Eddy from Berlin.