Blast kills seven in Pakistan police station
At least seven people were killed today when a bomb exploded at a police station in the north west Pakistani city of Peshawar.
Several other people were wounded in the blast – the latest in a series of militant attacks that have killed more than 150 people in Pakistan over the past two weeks.
The bomb went off at a building where criminals and militants are held for questioning. It also damaged a nearby mosque.
Peshawar, the main city in Pakistan’s Taliban-riddled North West Frontier province, has been hit by scores of attacks in recent years, including one bomb yesterday that killed a child.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility but suspicion fell on the Taliban.
They have been blamed for two weeks of attacks that appear aimed at forcing the Pakistani government to abandon a planned offensive into the militants’ stronghold along the Afghan border.
Television footage today showed the upper part of the wall of the brick mosque shorn off.
Security forces swarmed around the area as ambulances arrived at the scene.
A twisted chunk of metal on the ground was in flames, and a small white car’s front section was destroyed.
In nearby Lady Reading Hospital, rescue workers rushed wounded victims through the hallways on stretchers.
The latest violence came a day after militants launched coordinated attacks on three law enforcement compounds in the country’s second-largest city of Lahore, killing 19 people as well as the nine attackers.
