A twin suicide attack tore through a police compound in Pakistan yesterday, killing 11 people and heightening public anger over security breaches exposed by a wave of recent attacks.
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed power with a weak government on the frontline of the US-led war on terror, has been battered by assaults that have left more than 170 people dead in 11 days.
A woman suicide bomber on a motorbike and a car bomber unleashed fresh chaos yesterday, detonating near a police investigations office in a garrison area of Peshawar, bringing down a side of the building, police said.
“Police tried to intercept a woman sitting on a motorcycle with a terrorist. She blew herself up and after that there was another blast when a suicide attacker sitting in a car exploded,” said Liaqat Ali Khan, city police chief.
It was only the second suicide bomb attack by a woman in Pakistan. The twin blasts flung human limbs across the street, splattering blood on the ground and scattering shoes, a reporter said.
“There are two women and a child among the dead. The car exploded close to the police building. The building was badly damaged,” Sahibzada Mohammad Anees, the top administrative official, told reporters.
Officials said that 11 people were killed in all, including three policemen, and that seven wounded were in critical condition.
The main gate of the two-story police Central Investigation Agency building was destroyed, the upper portion of a mosque on the premises was damaged and a crater was punched out of the road in front, a reporter at the scene said.
“First I saw a blue flame then a loud explosion. When I got there I saw six bodies lying on the ground. I helped gather up body parts,” witness Saadat Changhzi said.
Home to 2.5 million Pakistanis, Peshawar is the largest city in the northwest and lies on the edge of the lawless tribal belt where Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked militants sheltered after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
Critics rounded on the civilian authorities for being unable to act on intelligence to prevent the attacks.
Militants, some in their teens, blasted their way into police offices on Thursday and traded fire for up to three hours.
At least 40 people died on Thursday in a string of assaults on security buildings in Lahore, at the heart of the country’s political heartland, and in bombings in the northwest.
Residents in Lahore, the cultural capital noted for its secular elite, asked how militants could have penetrated so far and so easily from their sanctuaries in the deeply conservative tribal belt on the Afghan border.
At least 10 attackers blasted their way into the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) branch in Lahore, a police academy in the suburb of Manawan and an elite commando school on the outskirts.
RSS