Nine-year-old would-be girl bomber arrested

The nine-year old girl, Sohana, who was wearing a blue school uniform and a white shawl, said she was brought by four persons, two of them women, to the checkpost and was directed to carry out the bombing near the security forces personnel. Instead of detonating, the girl started shouting as she ran toward the soldiers of the paramilitary Frontier Corps. She told them her kidnappers had strapped a suicide jacket around her body.

“She was taken into custody and the suicide jacket was removed from her body successfully,” said District Police Officer Dir Lower Saleem Marwat. He said the girl had been kidnapped from the Hashtnagri locality in Peshawar on June 19.

“I was picked up in Peshawar by three persons including two females soon after I came out of my house. They intoxicated me and I fell unconscious,” Sohana told journalists.

Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police Malakand Division, Qazi Jamil, told The News that the girl was a student ofclass three and she only knew the name of her father, Javed, as well as her place of residence, Hashtnagri. But she didn’t know exactly where in Hashtnagri her home was located.

Station house officer (SHO) of the Hashtnagri Police Station has denied registering a case of the kidnapping of a young girl from his area on Sunday. He told reporters, probably to avoid pressure, that the girl might be from Hashtnaghar, a name that refers to several towns in Charsadda.

Cops in Charsadda and Peshawar are making efforts to locate the family of Sohana but no one has thus far approached the police in connection with the missing girl. Media persons are also trying to locate Sohana’s family in the urban Hashtnagri town.

This is the third time a female was used to carry out a suicide bombing. A female suicide bomber had blown herself up near a ration point in the Bajaur Agency headquarters Khar in December last year. More than 40 people were killed and several wounded in that attack.

The first female used as a suicide bomber was a mentally retarded woman carrying explosives in her handbag. She was killed by security personnel near an Army checkpost in Peshawar Cantonment in December 2007.