United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned a series of deadly attacks on hospital patients as well as female teachers and students at Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University in Pakistan on Saturday, saying that such violence is meant to deter women “from attaining a basic right to education.”
According to authorities in Pakistan, militants “laid siege” to the Bolan medical complex in Quetta, holding hundreds of patients, physicians, and nurses hostage as they fought security forces. Police say that four nurses and two militants died in the ensuing crossfire, and two more militants blew themselves up.
The hospital patients included more than 20 people who’d been wounded in an earlier university bus explosion, which killed at least 14 women and shattered office and classroom windows inside Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University, according to Interior Minister Chaudry Nisar Ali Khan. Police officials claim that the hospital attack was a follow-up to the earlier attack on the university, and that all of the bus explosion victims were women.
[CNN]
Image via AP