A suicide bomber killed 19 people yesterday outside a courthouse in northwestern Pakistan, the latest attack in an onslaught by Islamist militants fighting back against an army offensive in the nearby Afghan border region.
The bombing was the seventh attack in less than two weeks in and around Peshawar, the largest city in the northwest. The attacks have killed more than 80 people.
The bomber, who arrived in a taxi, was being searched by police officers at the main gate of the city’s lower court when he detonated explosives on his body, government official Sahibzada Anees said.
The blast occurred near the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel, where at least nine people were killed when attackers shot their way through a security check post and blew up a truck bomb in June.
Police said the bomber blew himself up just as a van carrying prisoners was passing.
“It was a huge explosion. I saw smoke and dust everywhere. I fell on stairs and than I started running to save my life,” said Haji Hijab Gul, who was walking upstairs to court when he heard the blast.
Blood, flesh and shattered window glass littered the ground outside the court building, whose main gate was uprooted and where an old man who used to repair spectacles and fountain pens was killed, a reporter said.
Several damaged motorbikes were strewn about the site, and firefighters sprayed water on a charred, smoking white car.
Saib Gul of the city’s Lady Reading Hospital said 19 people were killed in the attack and 51 had been wounded. At least three of the dead were police.
The attack came just three days after a suicide bomber blew up a car packed with explosives, killing four people in a suburb as children were going to school, devastating a mosque, damaging a college and police station.
“These attacks will not deter us in our fight against these beasts who are killing our children,” North West Frontier Province Senior Minister Bashir Ahmad Bilour said yesterday.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for yesterday’s bombing, but Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has vowed to attack the cities to avenge a military assault on its South Waziristan stronghold, now into a fifth week.
The TTP claimed responsibility for a suicide car bombing that killed 15 people in Peshawar on Saturday and the bombing of the Peshawar headquarters of the nation’s top intelligence agency, the ISI, on Friday that killed 17 people.
The bomb explosion occurred hours after missiles fired from a suspected US drone killed three suspected militants in Shana Khuwara village in North Waziristan, another region close to the Afghan border region where al-Qaeda and Taliban hold sway.
The missiles hit a house owned by a local tribesman just after midnight, said two intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
RSS