Group calling itself 'Afghan Mujahideen' threatens to bomb G-B school

Tells school authorities to ensure women teachers follow 'Islamic dress code'

GILGIT: A group calling itself the ‘Afghan Mujahideen’ has threatened to bomb a private school in the Ghizer Valley of Gilgit-Baltistan if its administrators fail to ensure that the women teachers working their observe ‘Islamic dress code’.

The Oxford Public School – located in Hatun village, nearly eight kilometres Ghizer Valley’s main town of Gahkuch – received the handwritten threat on Friday.

“You are being warned. The school will be bombed if female teachers don’t observe ‘pardah’ from now on,” read the letter addressing the school’s headmaster. “This is the [first and] last warning.”



Sources told The Express Tribune that unidentified men broke into the school late Thursday night, vandalising furniture and other equipment. They also left this letter behind which was found by police on Friday.

The incident was the latest in a series of strange developments in Hatun village over the past couple of months, according to residents.

“First a SAP school was torched by unidentified men. Then a wall-chalking favouring a proscribed outfit appeared,” said Hatun resident Yaqub Khan. He said such incidents had created panic among the people of this small village where the crime rate had until now been zero.

Following these incidents, police and army mounted search operations in the town to trace the culprits. Police Superintendent Abdul Qayyum said they had registered cases and would apprehend the ‘terrorists’ behind the incidents soon.



G-B government spokesman Faizullah Faraq said intensive investigations were underway to unmask the elements involved in these incidents. “These incidents are being investigated by all agencies,” Faraq told The Express Tribune on Saturday. He said it was too premature to speculate, but whoever was involved in these incidents would not be spared.

Faraq highlighted Ghizer Valley’s strategic importance and said that this district straddles Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor in the north-west and China in the north. Ghizer borders Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s Chitral district in the west while Diamer is located in the south.