A suicide car bomb attack yesterday flattened a police building in Lahore, killing 23 people in what the government called revenge for an offensive against the Taliban.
The blast — the third deadly attack to rock the country’s liberal cultural capital in as many months — points to a widening net of Islamist violence that has killed more than 1,800 people across Pakistan in less than two years.
Up to five attackers opened fire and threw grenades before a van packed with explosives blew up outside an emergency response building beside the provincial headquarters of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, police said.
PHOTO: EPA
Two of the attackers were inside the vehicle but failed to storm the checkpoint, instead hitting the barrier, exploding into a ball of fire on the road and flattening the building, police and administration officials said.
Authorities said more than 300 people were wounded.
“I heard firing and then a huge blast,” said one policeman who staggered out of the rubble, saying that there were 30 to 35 policemen inside.
“The wall collapsed on me. I was trapped in the wreckage and fell unconscious,” said an elderly man, speaking to reporters from his hospital bed.
Rescue workers ferried out the injured on their backs while people tried to dig out one man in a traditional white shirt who lay trapped and helpless under stones and wooden planks.
The blast, which some witnesses likened to an earthquake, damaged nearby buildings in the security nerve center of Lahore, two months after a deadly assault on a police academy near the eastern city claimed by the Taliban.
“The initial investigation shows that the attackers first fired at the police and security pickets at the corner of the building and then an explosives-laden Toyota van blew up,” Lahore police chief Pervaiz Rathore said.
The Inter-Services Intelligence building was partly damaged and an intelligence officer was killed in the blast, one security official told reporters.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
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