Today Isis carried out a heinous kamikaze attack in Pakistan: today it broke into Quetta, the capital of the province of Baluchistan during a crowded religious service in the Bethel Memorial Methodist Christian church. Their task was to carry out an exemplary massacre, but they managed to kill nine people and injure 50 others. The operation began in the middle of the day, when four suicide bombers tried to enter the religious building without being noticed. Their attempt, provincial Interior Minister Mir Sarfraz Bugti announced, failed and the commandos had to engage in a first firefight in front of a checkpoint, where an agent was killed. Approaching the church where at that moment there were over 400 faithful, the terrorists, however, immediately encountered resistance from the security forces. And one of them was immediately killed just as he detonated the explosive charge he was carrying. A second instead activated his jacket a few meters ahead, without being able to get inside, but causing part of the building to collapse. This collapse resulted in deaths and injuries, most of them women and children. In this regard, Bugti told reporters that two members of the commando managed to escape before the arrival of the special forces, although “one of them was certainly injured. The prompt intervention of the security men, he added, "solved the emergency in 16 minutes, avoiding an even more serious massacre, given the hundreds of faithful who prayed in the church at the time of the attack". With less timeliness than usual, ISIS claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack through two tweets in Arabic from its Amaq news agency. In the first, it is said that "Islamic State suicide bombers attack a church in the city of Quetta in western Pakistan". And the second states that "about 50 people were killed or injured in the attack on the church in Quetta". The Bethel Memorial church targeted today by followers of the 'Caliph' Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was built in 1935 during the British colonial government and has since hosted the religious services of one of the denominations of Calvinist Protestantism. In the recent past in Pakistan, militants targeted two churches in the Youhan Abad area of Lahore in 2015, with a death toll of 15. Two years earlier, in the worst episode of violence against the Christian minority, a commando attacked a church in Peshawar, killing over 100 people.
