Taliban behind 'toy' bombing: Rahman Malik

Pakistan on Sunday accused the Taliban of carrying out the "toy bombing" in a northwesten district that took the lives of 13 innocent school children.
"Taliban have conducted the bombing and by taking the innocent children's lives, they unveiled their real face," Pakistan's Interior Minister Rahman Malik told Geo TV.

"The people cannot tolerate elements perpetrating such dastardly acts," Malik said, stressing that the government was being forced to take stern action because of such activities.

Thirteen children, aged between four and 12, were killed when a bomb placed as a football was detonated outside a girls' primary school in Lower Dir district in North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

The children mistook the bomb as a toy football and picked it up for playing. Over 40 others were also killed in the blast.

The interior minister said an investigation into the incident has been ordered on the directives of the president and the prime minister especially, from the angle of finding out whether the children were killed on their families' refusal to turn them into suicide bomber.

Meanwhile, six people of a family were killed in a grenade blast in North Waziristan Sunday.

According to officials, the grenade exploded in a pickup truck carrying a family of 10 near Datta Khel area of the tribal district, a known hotbed of Al Qaeda and Taliban militants along the Afghan border.

Dir adjoins the restive Swat region where fierce battles between the government forces and the Taliban militants stopped in February following a peace deal between the militants and the government.

But militant violence in the region in recent days has put the agreement in danger, with increasing pressure on Islamabad to act against the insurgents instead of ceding more and more territory to them. link....