The United States has spent almost USD 100 million in training Pakistani security personnel on how to make the country’s nuclear warheads safe and how to store them separately from the missiles and trigger devices.

But in the last year, officials in Washington have expressed growing alarm about Pakistan’s nuclear laboratories.

Police said the bus was carrying workers returning home from the nuclear lab. But since then, government officials have said that the bus belonged to a military engineering lab in Taxila, the report said.

An official at the complex, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, denied that. And, in another indication that the wounded were employees of the nuclear programme, officials at the scene had said some of them would be treated at a hospital run by the nuclear labs.

In an editorial, ‘The Nation’ noted that “the militants have now started attacking the very basis of the country’s conventional as well as nuclear defence.”

“The fact that the employees of one of the major nuclear facilities are not provided proper security is a serious comment on the working of our law enforcement apparatus,” it said.