Pakistan school bus attack kills four children: police

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Gunmen ambushed a Pakistani school bus on Tuesday, killing four children and the driver in a hail of bullets and rocket fire on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar, police said.

The motive for the attack was not immediately clear, but the children studied at an elite English-language school of a type reviled by hardline Islamist militants who oppose what they as Western-imported, secular education.

The boys, aged nine to 14, were targeted in the Matani area close to Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt, which the United States considers the most dangerous region on earth and an Al-Qaeda headquarters.

Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility for Tuesday's attack, bombings blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked networks have killed more than 4,630 people since 2007, destabilising the nuclear-armed state.

"Gunmen opened fire on a school van and also lobbed a rocket in Peshawar's suburb of Matani," senior police official Ejaz Khan said.

"We are checking why the bus was targeted," he said.

Habib Khattak, a doctor at Peshawar's Lady Reading Hospital, said 18 wounded were admitted after the attack. Twelve of them were children, he said, with the others teachers and passers-by.

The vehicle belonged to the private Khyber School, Khan said. Fee-paying, English-language schools are almost universally patronised by Pakistan's middle and upper classes, with English widely used by the federal government.

"The driver and four children have been killed," Kalam Khan, a senior police official said.

"The children are aged nine to 14. Five children are injured," he added.

Police said the bus was taking children home at the end of the school day, which in Pakistan finishes in the early afternoon.

"The gunmen were waiting for the bus in fields and attacked when it came close. They fired a rocket and then fired bullets on the van," said Kalam Khan.