3 US Soldiers Killed in Attack on Pakistan Girls' School

Bomb targets convoy traveling to school's opening ceremony

By Rob Quinn, Newser Staff

Posted Feb 3, 2010 2:56 AM CST
Updated Feb 3, 2010 6:00 AM CST

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3 US Soldiers Killed in Attack on Pakistan Girls' School — Pakistani displaced refugees sit at Got Koto to enter in Pakistan's troubled Swat Valley on Friday, June 5, 2009 in Pakistan. Hundreds of Pakistani refugees were stopped from returning to their homes in the Swat Valley on Friday, even after the army chief said the battle against the Taliban there had... (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

Three US soldiers were among at least 10 people killed when the Pakistani Taliban targeted the opening ceremony of a girls' school today. At least 70 people, including many schoolgirls, were injured when a roadside blast hit a group traveling in a convoy guarded by a military escort, the BBC reports. The American soldiers were said to have been training Pakistani troops in counterinsurgency.

The bomb was detonated as the convoy passed another school, which was badly damaged in the blast. The convoy was traveling through the Dir Valley in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, where the Pakistani military has fought several fierce campaigns to crush Taliban militants. The school they were traveling to was reopening after having been reduced to rubble in an earlier militant attack. (More Pakistan stories.)

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