Friday, September 18, 2009

Suicide Blast Kills 25 in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide car bomb attack on Friday in a Shiite marketplace in northwest Pakistan has killed at least 25 people and wounded 36, a police commander in the city of Kohat said.

The attack flattened a two-story hotel and a number of shops at the Kacha Pakha bazaar. Rescue teams worked through the afternoon to pull victims from the rubble. The bomb contained more than 300 pounds of explosives, Ali Hassan Khan, the police commander, said

Kohat is a market town in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province about 30 miles south of the volatile city of Peshawar and 100 miles west of the capital, Islamabad.

The Kohat district is predominantly Sunni Muslim, and its outlying areas have long served as a safe haven for Taliban fighters. But there are a number of Shiite communities in the district as well, and sectarian violence there has been chronic and deadly.

A crowd of Shiite residents in Kohat town, angry at the failure of the police to provide security in their vulnerable neighborhoods, attacked a police car with rocks when it arrived at the scene of the blast on Friday.

Recent operations by the police and government security forces against Taliban militants have further heightened tensions in the district.

The News International, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, reported the arrests of 22 suspected Taliban insurgents on Monday — along with the seizure of dozens of weapons and 11 pounds of hashish — followed by eight more arrests on Thursday.

The police also demolished the houses of two fugitive insurgents in the Kohat district, the paper said, which resulted in the reprisal bombing of the home of a member of a pro-government militia.

Also Thursday, a bomb exploded in a Kohat electronics shop, injuring at least three people. Five neighboring shops were demolished by the bomb, which had been planted in a barrel of clarified butter.

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