The death toll from a suicide bombing and car bomb blast that devastated a Pakistani tribal town has soared to 102 in one of the country’s deadliest attacks, officials said yesterday.
The explosions targeted a busy market in Yakaghund town in Pakistan’s northwest tribal belt on Friday, destroying government buildings and shops and leaving victims buried under the rubble.
Local administration chief Rasool Khan said the death toll had jumped to 102, after he and other officials had earlier put the number of dead at 65.
“Some bodies were recovered from the spot and some died in hospitals overnight,” he told reporters.
Another local official, Mairaj Mohammad, confirmed the higher toll and said there were 98 people receiving treatment in different hospitals.
“Some of them are in critical condition,” he said.
It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan since a massive car bomb destroyed a market crowded with women and children in the northwestern city of Peshawar in October last year, killing 125 people.
Khan said the toll could rise further as rescue work was underway to recover victims who are feared trapped under pulverized buildings.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for Friday’s blasts, saying the target was a gathering of pro-government tribal elders.
Qari Ikramullah, a spokesman for Taliban militants in the region, said in a telephone call that the elders were meeting in an administrator’s office and planning to raise a lashkar, or tribal force, to fight the Taliban.
“We will attack such gatherings in future also,” he said.
A Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked bombing spree across Pakistan has killed more than 3,500 people in three years since government troops besieged the radical Red Mosque in the capital Islamabad in July 2007.
Witnesses said the huge explosions on Friday damaged an administration office, shops, a jail and other buildings in the small town not far from the border with Afghanistan, where 140,000 US-led foreign troops are fighting the Taliban.
The attack sent a pall of gloom over the town. Bodies wrapped in white shrouds were being brought to a local playground for funeral prayers, a reporter saw.
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