A suicide bomber killed three people yesterday in the second attack in the Pakistani city of Peshawar in 24 hours as militants stepped up efforts to avenge a major offensive against the Taliban.
Police said the bomber got out of a rickshaw and detonated his explosives at a police checkpoint on the outer ring road of the northwestern metropolis, which runs into the al-Qaeda and Taliban-infested tribal badlands.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has suffered a wave of Islamist bombings since July 2007, has been rocked by a spike in bloodshed killing more than 350 people since the start of last month and forcing troops onto the offensive in the tribal belt.
“The driver stopped his [the bomber’s] rickshaw at the checkpoint and a police constable asked him to get out but he appeared reluctant,” said policeman Asmatullah Khan, who watched the attack from behind sandbags.
“The constable tried to drag him out. He blew himself up soon after stepping out of the vehicle. The rickshaw driver also died,” Khan said.
Officials said three people were killed — a policeman and two civilians.
The blast destroyed two vehicles, left the rickshaw a mangled wreck, damaged a police van and splattered blood on the road at the small checkpoint where police erected barricades to search cars, an Agence France-Presse reporter said.
“I saw a police official arguing with a rickshaw occupant, who was a young man 20 or 22 years old sporting a small beard. The man came out and there was a big blast,” van driver Qasim Khan said.
Suicide attacks and bombings frequently strike the sprawling conservative Muslim city of 2.5 million people. In the deadliest attack in Pakistan in two years, a massive car bomb killed 118 people in a Peshawar market on Oct. 28.
Dr Zafar Iqbal at the city’s main government-run Lady Reading Hospital said four bodies, including that of the bomber, were brought to the morgue.
“We received four bodies, one police official and two civilians. The fourth body was that of the suicide attacker. It was unrecognizable,” he said.
The attack came 24 hours after a suicide strike in a crowded cattle market in Peshawar, where devout Muslims are already making preparations to buy meat for the Id al-Adha festival later this month.
The death toll from that incident rose to 14 yesterday. The victims included a local mayor, the target of the bombing.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for that attack, saying it was avenging Mayor Abdul Malik’s efforts to raise a militia to fight Islamist rebels after he cut formerly close links to the Taliban movement last year.
There was no claim of responsibility for yesterday’s bombing, but Pakistan’s security forces have been in the crosshairs of brazen Taliban attacks since unleashing a major ground and air offensive in South Waziristan on Oct. 17.
Late on Sunday, police shot dead a would-be suicide bomber who approached a checkpoint in the heavily guarded and leafy capital Islamabad shouting “Allah Akhbar!” officials said.
Police said the man came from South Waziristan, where the homegrown Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) movement has carved out bastions and where the military has claimed a string of successes in its latest anti-Taliban campaign.
Pakistan’s military and civilian government have blamed recent attacks in cities on TTP militants avenging both the military offensive and the killing of their leader Baitullah Mehsud in a US missile attack in August.
Approximately 30,000 troops are pressing a three-pronged offensive against TTP hideouts in South Waziristan, part of the tribal belt on the Afghan border where US officials say Al-Qaeda is plotting attacks on the West.
Backed by fighter jets and helicopter gunships, the area is a closed military zone and details are impossible to confirm independently.
Pakistan’s military on Sunday said that 20 insurgents had been killed in the last 24 hours, taking the total insurgent death toll to 478 in three weeks.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.