About 38 people – including women and children – have been reportedly killed after unidentified gunmen opened fire on a convoy of 200 passenger vehicles traveling through a remote area of Pakistan.
According to the area’s deputy police commissioner, the vehicles were ambushed as they travelled through the tribal district of Kurram in Pakistan, near the Afghan border.
Additionally, the gunmen originally targeted the convoy’s police escort, according to the provincial spokesman said in a statement.
Police were protecting the convoy after months of sectarian violence in the area when the attack struck.
The chief secretary of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Nadeem Aslam Chaudhry, told Reuters that Thursday’s attack was “a major tragedy”, with the death toll “likely to rise”.
At the time of filing this report, at least 11 people were reported to be injured.
While the details of exactly what happened are still emerging, Javed ullah Mehsud, a senior administration official, told AFP that “approximately 10 attackers” were involved, “firing indiscriminately from both sides of the road”.
