The death toll from a devastating car bomb in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar has risen to 12 after a teenage boy died overnight, a police official said yesterday.
The blast ripped through a packed street Saturday, killing men, women and children and leaving severed body parts littering the roads near an ice cream shop and an Internet cafe in the densely populated Kashkal area.
“One of the seriously injured of yesterday’s blast died in the hospital at night,” Peshawar police official Khan Abbas said from a hospital treating the wounded. “So far, we have registered 36 injured in the blast.”
PHOTO: REUTERS
Abbas said that the boy, aged 16 or 17, was the fourth youngster to perish in the explosion.
Two boys aged about 15 or 16 died on Saturday, while an 11-year-old girl who was studying at a nearby school for the disabled also died. Two of the dead were women, he said, and the rest were men.
A bomb disposal official said more that 30kg of explosives was used in the blast, which was detonated by a timer.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack, but swathes of the North West Frontier Province — of which Peshawar is the capital — have been plagued by a violent uprising led by Taliban extremists.
Peshawar is the gateway to Pakistan’s troubled tribal belt on the Afghan border, where the US says Taliban and al-Qaeda extremists have carved out safe havens to plot new attacks on the West.
Desperate families had sought shelter in Peshawar after escaping a military offensive against Taliban militants in three districts further north, where the Pakistani army is determined to drive out encroaching rebel fighters.
The UN refugee agency had said more that 1.1 million people have fled the fighting and registered with authorities in the past two weeks.
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