Pakistan has accused India of pursuing “state terrorism” after a suicide bombing killed at least 12 people outside a judicial complex in its capital Islamabad.
Tuesday’s attack was a rare strike in the capital, which has remained largely insulated from the surging violence plaguing Pakistan’s western frontier with Afghanistan in recent months.
The bombing and a separate assault on a cadet college near the border with Afghanistan on Monday were the “worst examples of Indian state terrorism in the region”, the Pakistan government said in a post on its official account on the social media site X on Tuesday evening.
“It is time for the world to condemn such nefarious conspiracies of India,” the post quoted Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif as saying, but offered no evidence for its allegation that the attacks were carried out by insurgents supported by New Delhi.
READ MORE
Pakistan and India have long accused each other of supporting terrorists and separatist groups on their territories. The two nuclear-armed neighbours fought a brief but fierce conflict in May after New Delhi accused Islamabad of involvement in a massacre in Kashmir.
The Indian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the accusation of involvement in the Islamabad bombing, which was the deadliest attack in the Pakistani capital in over a decade.
Pakistan’s interior minister Mohsin Naqvi told reporters an attacker tried to “enter the court premises” at about noon on Tuesday, at a time when they are usually packed with visitors attending hearings, and detonated his explosives near a police van. More than two dozen people were injured, Naqvi said.
“It’s not just another bombing. It happened in Islamabad,” he said.
Pakistan’s defence minister Khawaja Asif on Tuesday afternoon suggested Afghanistan’s Taliban government was to blame for the bombing.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, an affiliate of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) – an Islamist insurgent group that Islamabad says is based in Afghanistan – later claimed responsibility for the attack.
“We are in a state of war,” Mr Asif wrote in a post on X. “The rulers of Kabul can stop terrorism in Pakistan, but bringing this war all the way to Islamabad is a message from Kabul, to which – praise be to God – Pakistan has the full strength to respond.”
The attack came amid tensions between Pakistan and neighbours Afghanistan and India, which Islamabad accuses of sponsoring and supporting militants in its territory. New Delhi and Kabul both deny any involvement in terrorism in Pakistan, and accuse Islamabad of using allegations of such involvement as a pretext to destabilise both nations.
A third round of peace talks between Pakistani and Afghan Taliban officials held in Istanbul collapsed last week.
The negotiations, brokered by Qatar and Turkey, began last month after Islamabad launched multiple air and drone strikes on Afghanistan, including against the capital of Kabul, and the Taliban responded with cross-border raids. Dozens of civilians and soldiers were killed before a ceasefire was announced.
This year, the TPP, which is also known as the Pakistani Taliban, and Baloch separatist groups have killed more than 1,600 civilians and security forces, the highest death toll in a decade, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a database compiled by the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.
The Islamabad attack came a day after a car explosion in New Delhi that India’s prime minister Narendra Modi blamed on unnamed “conspirators”.
The explosion, outside New Delhi’s historic Red Fort, Killed at lease eight people. In a speech on Tuesday, Mr Modi, said: “The conspirators behind this will not be spared. All those responsible will be brought to justice.”
According to reports, four people have been arrested in connection with the incident. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025/Additional reporting: Guardian
