Author:
Publication: BBC News
Date: February 20, 2004
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3507401.stm
Police in Pakistan's remote Northern
Areas said on Friday that a ninth school in five days had been attacked
and destroyed.
Local officials have blamed hardline
Islamists opposed to female education.
Eight of the schools were for girls,
although the latest - burned down in a village near the town of Chilas
on Thursday - was a boys' school.
Three people have been arrested,
taking the total detained over the spate of attacks to 20.
The schools attacked were mostly
set up by non- governmental organisations with foreign assistance.
The BBC's Haroon Rashid in Peshawar
says observers view the attacks as a setback to efforts to promote literacy
in the under-developed region.
Aid opposed
Thursday night's attack was on a
two-room community school in a remote village called Akhrot, near Chilas,
120km south of the regional capital of Gilgit.
Police said unidentified people
torched the school, destroying the furniture and wooden parts of the building.
No one was injured.
On 15 February seven girls' schools
under the government's Social Action Programme were destroyed in the Daarayle
Valley.
On 19 February a primary school
in Chilas was dynamited.
Some local officials blame people
opposed to the education of girls.
However, others believe the latest
incident shows a more general targeting of international aid agencies by
people who regard the construction of community schools with their funding
as un-Islamic.
Last year attacks at the offices
of the International Fund for Agriculture Development (Ifad) and the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Chilas caused severe damage.
Local officials say they have formed
committees to investigate the matter.
A senior government official in
Gilgit told the Reuters news agency: "We have about 100 community schools
and the attacks have not stopped girls from going to them."
The Northern Areas have a population
of around 1.5 million.
The literacy rate is among the lowest
in the country at 12% but efforts by aid agencies to raise it have been
met with suspicion by some hardline Islamists.
This week's attacks came shortly
after President Pervez Musharraf appealed to Muslim religious leaders to
help curb extremism.