Nine killed in Peshawar car bomb

By AFP
Published: February 2, 2011
Pakistani security officials and local residents gather at the car bomb blast site in Peshawar on February 2, 2011. PHOTO: AFP
PESHAWAR: A car bomb tore through a packed Peshawar market near a police station on Wednesday, killing nine people, in the fifth attack in the city in less than a week, officials said.

The bomb was planted in a car, devastating shops and vehicles as civilians thronged the congested area at the start of the working day in the northwestern city at the forefront of Taliban and al Qaeda-linked attacks.

“It was a timed bomb. The target was police. He parked the car here due to the rush,” senior police official Mohammad Ijaz Khan told reporters.

Peshawar’s main Lady Reading Hospital said it had received nine dead after the attack, including three children and one woman.

“Nineteen people were also injured. Children and women are among the injured as well,” hospital chief Abdul Hamid Afridi told AFP. Peshawar city police chief Liaquat Ali Khan confirmed the death toll, but said 21 people had been injured.

“The bomb blast took place in a congested market. All the dead and injured are civilians,” Siraj Ahmad, head of Peshawar administration. “About 40 to 45 kilograms (90 to 100 pounds) of explosives were used. Four vehicles were destroyed and 16 shops were badly damaged. Some of them were completely destroyed,” bomb disposal official Tanvir Ahmad told reporters.

On Monday, twin bomb attacks targeting police in Peshawar killed six people. The Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a police patrol in which a teenage bomber killed five people on the city’s outskirts. On Saturday, a double truck bombing killed four people at a tunnel connecting Peshawar to the garrison town of Kohat.
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