Pakistan on Tuesday said that the surge in violence and a suicide attack targeting Chinese workers was orchestrated from neighbouring Afghanistan.
“The suicide attack targeting Chinese engineers was planned and controlled from Afghanistan while the suicide bomber was an Afghan citizen,” the military’s spokesman Major General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry told a press conference.
At least five Chinese citizens were killed in the suicide attack on a bus in Bisham district of the volatile Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan in March.
According to details, there are some 29,000 Chinese nationals in Pakistan, of which more than 2,500 are working on the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a 3,000-kilometre Chinese infrastructure project that is part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, under which China has pledged $62 billion to Pakistan.
More than 5,000 Chinese citizens are working on other development projects.
Chaudhry said that terrorists from Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have hideouts in Afghanistan and are continuously using Afghan soil for launching attacks in Pakistan.
Pakistan presented “concrete evidence but no positive progress” on pledges made by the Afghan interim government "not to allow Afghan soil for terrorism," the spokesman said. Those pledges are part of the Doha agreement reached between the United States and the Afghan Taliban in 2020 that led to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.