Chinese teachers at KU’s Confucius Institute leave for China
Karachi: Chinese teachers at the Confucius Institute of the University of Karachi (KU) have left for their country after the last month’s suicide attack that left three Chinese teachers and one Pakistani national dead.
Pakistani Director of the Confucius Institute KU Dr Nasir Uddin said that several teachers across Pakistan, teaching at the Confucius Institutes of various universities, had returned to China following the incident.
“It is not only in the Karachi University but teachers at the different Confucius Institutes in the country have flown back to China,” he told journalists.
He maintained that the Confucius Institute was not being closed and for the time being Pakistani teachers were trying to accommodate the Mandarin classes.
The Confucius Institute, he informed, was considering to hold classes and exams online. Dr Nasir Uddin mentioned that currently at least 500 students were studying at the institute.
The Confucius Institute at the University of Karachi was jointly established by the University of Karachi and Sichuan Normal University in China in 2013.
The institute is a non-profit educational institution which aims to teach mandarin, deepen international understanding of the language, and Chinese culture, and promote people-to-people exchanges between China and Pakistan.
The institute was recently in the news after four people, including three Chinese teachers, were killed while four others sustained injuries in a suicide explosion at its premises on April 26.
According to the Pakistani Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD), the KU attack was a suicide blast carried out by a burqa (veil)-clad woman.
The deceased Chinese nationals were identified as the director of the Confucius Institute Huang Guiping, Ding Mupeng, Chen Sai, and their Pakistani driver, Khalid.
A banned outfit had claimed the responsibility for the attack. The security agencies have launched an operation to apprehend those involved in the blast but so far no major success has been achieved.
On Saturday, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari had reiterated his strong condemnation of Karachi terrorist attack and reaffirmed the government’s commitment to thoroughly investigate the incident and bring the perpetrators to justice.
The Foreign Minister expressed his determination to not allow anyone to harm the iron-clad friendship between Pakistan and China and underscored that the Pakistan-China “iron-brotherhood” would continue to grow.
