PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Saturday (AFP) - A suspected car bomb killed six people and wounded more than 10 others on a road leading to the main army cantonment in Pakistan's northwest city of Peshawar on Saturday, police said.
“Six men were killed and 25 injured,” senior police officer Abdul Ghafour Afridi told AFP at the scene of the attack, where the force of the blast gutted cars and punched out the windows of buildings.
The deadly blast, the second in the region within a matter of hours, ripped through a crowded area, near two banks, shops and a wedding hall on Mall Road, near a cantonment of army offices and residential quarters for commanders.
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| Bodies lie beside the wreckage of vehicles after a suicide blast in Peshawar on September 26, 2009. Suicide bombers blew up vehicles packed with explosives, killing 12 people in northwest Pakistan on September 26 and escalating a campaign of revenge against security forces, officials said. |
“I can see casualties lying on the ground,” police official Anwar Khan told AFP by telephone. “We are not clear whether it was a car bomb but it was a huge bomb blast,” he told AFP in the initial minutes after the attack.
TV footage showed volunteers hauling the wounded on to the back of trucks as police tried to evacuate the area and ambulances inching through onlookers as a young girl limped away with blood spattered on her green dress.
“It was a huge bomb blast, so many bank officials are trapped inside the bank. I can see surrounding buildings damaged and vehicles damaged,” bank official Saghir Khan told AFP.
The attack came hours after a Taliban suicide bomber blew up a truck packed with explosives outside a police station, killing five people and wounding more than 50 others on the edge of another northwest town, officials said.
That attack took place on the outskirts of Bannu town in a district close to the rugged tribal region of North Waziristan where Washington says Al-Qaeda and the Taliban established bases after the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
Pakistan's umbrella Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) organisation claimed responsibility and threatened to unleash bigger attacks on government targets to avenge the killing of their leader Baitullah Mehsud in a US drone attack.
Bannu is a garrison town. Police and soldiers are the main target of Islamist militants but large numbers of civilians have also died.
Police said the dead included two detainees who had been held in the police station's jail. Among the wounded were about 20 policemen and 10 civilians.
Pakistan, on the frontline of the United States' war on al-Qaeda, has been hit by a wave of bombings that have killed more than 2,100 people across the nuclear-armed country over the past two years.
The government in Islamabad has vowed to wipe out Islamist militants from Pakistan's northwest. Last April, troops launched a blistering assault designed to dislodge Pakistani Taliban from the northwest Swat valley.
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