A suicide car bomb tore through a packed shopping street in a Pakistan town yesterday, killing 25 people in the third militant attack to strike the nuclear-armed country in as many days.
The bomber blew up his vehicle in the heart of the northwest town of Charsadda on a road lined with fruit and juice shops, ripping off shop roofs and littering the ground with slippers, human flesh and broken push carts.
“We have at present 25 dead. Six of them are children and three are women,” Dr Zulfiqar Ahmad said at the main hospital in Charsadda, just north of the city of Peshawar.
“There are 42 wounded people,” Ahmad said.
Six seriously wounded were taken to Peshawar, on the edge of Pakistan's tribal belt that US officials call the most dangerous place on Earth and a chief al-Qaeda sanctuary.
The government blames a spike in attacks on Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which has vowed to avenge a major offensive against its strongholds and the killing of their leader Baitullah Mehsud by a US missile in August.
“The bombing today was the militants' reaction to the ongoing anti-Taliban operation in South Waziristan,” North West Frontier Province Law Minister Arshad Abdullah told Geo television.
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