Gunmen have stormed a school in Pakistan’s volatile northwest, killing several teachers and gunning down another teacher from the school in a separate attack, according to officials.
In Kurram, a district in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that borders Afghanistan, a group of gunmen on Thursday stormed a government school where students were taking exams. The seven teachers killed were members of Pakistan’s minority Shia community, which is frequently targeted by fighters.
Another teacher from the same school, a Sunni Muslim, was gunned down on the road in a separate attack earlier in the day in Kurram, according to local police official Abbas Ali.
According to Al Jazeera, no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks and Ali said it was not clear if they were linked.
“We are looking into all aspects, and so far we have no idea who killed the teachers,” he said. The prime minister condemned the attacks on teachers and ordered a probe into the killings.
Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said the “gruesome incident” took place in an area that has witnessed in the past sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni tribes.
“Most of the teachers who were killed belonged to the Turi Shia tribe,” Hyder said.
Abid Hussaini, a local police official, said the authorities had shifted seven bodies from the school to the hospital but they could not speculate on what was behind the killing.