A suicide car bombing at a police station in northwestern Pakistan killed at least six officers yesterday — the latest in a string of attacks claimed by Taliban militants, security officials said.
Meanwhile, a bomb rigged to a bicycle went off near a vehicle carrying a senior police investigator in the southern city of Karachi, wounding four people, said Wasim Ahmad, the city’s police chief.
The investigator Raja Umar Khatab, who has played a key role in arresting many militants in recent years, was among those hurt, he said.
The attacks underscore the many challenges ahead for the two main parties in Pakistan’s ruling coalition — traditional rivals who united to force former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf from power less than one week ago.
Though the five-month-old government initially sought to tame militants in peace negotiations, it has in recent weeks become entangled in increased fighting with hard-line Islamic movements along its border.
That was hammered home two days ago, when Taliban militants carried out one of Pakistan’s deadliest-ever terrorist attacks — twin suicide bombings that killed 67 people at the country’s biggest weapons manufacturing complex.
Yesterday’s attack in Swat, where Islamic militants have been battling security forces to pressure the government to enforce Taliban-style religious laws, killed six and wounded several others, local police official Mohib Ullahn said.
A Taliban spokesman, Muslim Khan, immediately claimed responsibility and vowed more bombings if the government did not halt army operations in the area, once a popular tourist destination.
“We had warned the government [we would] target police and the army if it didn’t stop operations against us in Swat,” he said by telephone. “The government ignored and continued attacking our position.”
Also yesterday, a civilian died and three were wounded in the Bari Kot village in Swat when a roadside bomb exploded near their vehicle, Khan said.
Pakistan is a key ally of the US in its war on terror and has been fighting militants in the country’s tribal regions near the Afghan border since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US.
The violence has spread to Swat and some other more-populated areas in recent years.
Meanwhile, Pakistani troops killed 35 militants in fighting in the Swat Valley northwest yesterday after the militants ambushed a patrol, a military official said.
Four soldiers were also killed, the official said. The fighting erupted shortly after a suicide bomber rammed a vehicle into a police station in another part of the valley, killing eight policemen.
The violence, combined with uncertainty over the future of a fractious coalition government, has helped undermine investor confidence and send the country’s financial markets on a downward spiral.
Separately, militants killed two civilians and wounded three children in a bomb attack near a security checkpost in Barikot, to the west of Mingora, the valley’s main town.
Until last year, the valley had been one of the country’s main tourist destinations.
But Pakistani Taliban fighters infiltrated from enclaves on the Afghan border last year to support a radical cleric bent on imposing hardline Islamist rule.
Violence subsided in Pakistan when a coalition government came to power after an election in February and opened talks with militants. In May, authorities in the North West Frontier Province reached a peace deal with militants in Swat.
But attacks intensified again across the northwest, including the Swat Valley, after top Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud suspended talks in June.
The resignation of staunch US ally Pervez Musharraf as president on Monday has raised questions about the government’s commitment to tackle violence.
But while Musharraf’s support for the US-led war on terrorism was deeply unpopular, the government has vowed to keep up efforts to fight the militants.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS