Islamabad, Pakistan — A suicide bombing outside district court buildings in a residential area of the Pakistani capital killed at least a dozen people on Tuesday, Pakistan’s interior minister said, as senior Pakistani officials accused the country’s neighbors India and Afghanistan of being complicit in the attack.
“At 12:39 p.m. (0239 Eastern), a suicide attack was carried out at the Kachehri (district courts) … so far 12 people have been martyred and around 27 are wounded,” Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi told reporters at the scene of the incident.
“As I entered the court building, a huge blast occurred. I thought the entire judiciary building would collapse on me,” Zahid Khan, who works as an assistant to a lawyer at the court, told CBS News’ Sami Yousafzai. “When I went upstairs, I saw people lying on the ground around the fire … Just three minutes earlier, I had been at that exact spot while parking my bike.”
“I saw many people lying injured, with blood on the road,” he said.
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He noted the timing of the attack, coming a week after the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, along with some elements of the Afghan Taliban issued threats against Pakistani cities.
The alleged suicide attack in Islamabad also came a day after militants stormed a military college in Wana, in Pakistan’s South Waziristan region. Two militants were killed in the assault, officials said.
The TTP, in statements shared with CBS News, denied involvement in both the Islamabad and Wana attacks, but Pakistani security officials and analysts said the group was likely responsible for both.
Last week, a TTP source told CBS News the group considers its campaign against Pakistan’s government a “holy struggle,” and they warned that it has “human and technical resources in all major cities” — and plans to stage new, large-scale attacks.
The attacker tried on Tuesday to “enter the court premises but, failing to do so, targeted a police vehicle,” Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi told journalists. He alleged that the attack was “carried out by Indian-backed elements and Afghan Taliban proxies” linked to the TTP, but he said authorities were “looking into all aspects” of the explosion.
Pakistan’s Minister of Defense Khawaja Asif blamed Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers for allowing the attack to take place on Tuesday. The neighbors have long had tense relations, with Islamabad accusing Afghan authorities of allowing the TTP to operate within Afghanistan’s borders.
“Kabul’s rulers can stop terrorism in Pakistan, but today’s suicide attack at the Islamabad district courts proves this is a nationwide war,” Asif said in a statement Tuesday. “Anyone who believes the Pakistan Army is only fighting on the Afghan-Pakistan border and in remote Balochistan should take this attack as a wake-up call. This is a war for all of Pakistan.”
Pakistan and Afghanistan held two rounds of talks aimed at addressing mutual security concerns in October and earlier this month, but both ended without any solid agreement between the neighbors, and Asif said in his statement after the Tuesday explosion in Islamabad that, “in this environment, it would be futile to place greater hope in successful negotiations with the rulers in Kabul.”
One member of the Afghan Taliban’s negotiating team told CBS News on Tuesday that the talks had failed due to Pakistan’s unrealistic demands for the Taliban to restrain the TTP.
“It was far beyond our control and capacity,” the Afghan Taliban official said, accusing Pakistan of failing to effectively counter the TTP itself.
The Islamabad explosion also came a day after a large blast rocked the Red Fort, a major tourist destination in neighboring India’s capital city New Delhi.
That explosion killed eight people, and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Tuesday that the “conspirators” behind the blast “will not be spared,” vowing that “all those responsible will be brought to justice.”
Pakistan and India are nuclear armed neighbors that have clashed often, usually over the disputed Kashmir border region. Dozens of people were killed in May when India launched military strikes in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and deep inside Pakistan, saying it was targeting militants in the country that had carried out multiple attacks on India.