Pakistan to perform DNA testing on the remains of the suicide bomber who killed 5 Chinese nationals

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani authorities will perform DNA testing on the remains of the suicide bomber who rammed his explosive-laden car into a vehicle in the country’s northwest, killing five Chinese nationals and their local driver, officials said Wednesday.

The attack occurred in Shangla, a district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where thousands of Chinese nationals work on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which includes a multitude of megaprojects such as road construction, power plants and agriculture. The CPEC is a lifeline for Pakistan’s cash-strapped government, currently facing one of its worst economic crises.

The five were engineers and laborers heading Tuesday to the Dasu Dam, the biggest hydropower project in Pakistan, where they worked. Their remains were transported to the capital, Islamabad, local police official Altaf Khan said, adding that the deceased had a police escort when the attack happened.

Pakistani officials said they shared the latest investigation developments with their Chinese counterparts. China is expected to send its own experts Wednesday to the attack site to conduct an independent investigation while collaborating with Pakistani authorities.

Khan said they have further expanded a search that started a day earlier, looking for the attacker’s possible accomplices.

No group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion is likely to fall on separatists as well as a breakaway Gul Bahadur faction of Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, and is a separate group, but a close ally of the Afghan Taliban.

The TTP denied being behind the attack in a statement Wednesday, saying: “We are in no way related to the attack on the Chinese