In a first case of its kind, an eight-year-old girl was reportedly forced by terrorists to wear a suicide vest for blowing herself up at a check-post in the Lower Dir area of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa – formerly North West Frontier Province.
However, she surrendered herself to the very police she was supposed to attack. Narrating her experience to the media, Suhana — a Class III student — said she was kidnapped from her hometown in Peshawar by two women and a man on Sunday.
The kidnappers apparently beckoned her and when she approached them, they put a handkerchief around her nose after which she fell unconscious. Once she regained consciousness, Suhana said she was forced to wear a suicide vest and taken to the police post in Balambat area of Lower Dir.
After dropping her off near the check-post with the instruction to approach the police and blow herself up once she got there, her abductors fled the spot. Making use of the opportunity, she ran to the police and raised an alarm, Suhana said.
This is arguably the first case of someone so young being forced into becoming a suicide bomber and that, too, within a day of being in the clutches of terrorists. Using children as suicide bombers is nothing new in this country and the past few months have thrown up many instances where teenaged boys blew themselves up.
Often they did not even know who their targets were as became evident in April when a 14-year-old would-be suicide bomber – nabbed before he could detonate himself – told the police that he and his associates were told that they were being taken to Afghanistan to attack the Americans. Instead, they were dropped off at the Sufi shrine of Sakhi Sarwar in South Punjab on April 3 where their attack killed over 40 people.
