Security personnel at the site of a bomb attack in Badaber on the outskirts of Peshawar, yesterday.
QUETTA: Bomb attacks killed 53 people in Pakistan yesterday, officials said. In the two deadliest attacks a suicide bomber killed 28 people at a checkpoint near a Shia mosque in the southwestern city of Quetta, and a car bombing killed 17 in the northwest.
The combined toll marked the deadliest day for more than four months in the nuclear-armed state. In Quetta, officials said a suicide bomber tried to access a Shia mosque in the congested Hazara town, a mainly Shia community on the edge of the city, but was intercepted at a checkpoint.
“Twenty-eight people have been killed and more than 51 others are injured,” said senior police official Mir Zubair. “Nine women, a minor girl and four boys were also killed in the attack,” Zubair told reporters.
Baluchistan provincial home secretary Akbar Hussain Durrani said the bomber blew himself up at a checkpoint set up by a local neighbourhood volunteers around 50 yards away from the mosque. “The evening prayers had just ended in the mosque and most of the victims are Shias,” he said.
Quetta is one of the most volatile cities in Pakistan, gripped by Taliban violence, a separatist Baluch insurgency and a growing number of attacks on the Shia minority.
Earlier, a car bomb targeted a security force convoy on the outskirts of Peshawar. Jamil Shah, spokesman for the government-run Lady Reading Hospital in the city, said 17 people were killed and 46 injured. At least four children and one woman were among the dead, and two children and a woman were among those hurt, he added.
Police said most of the victims were civilians because the bomb targeting the Frontier Corps (FC) convoy exploded in a bustling market area. Shops and cars were damaged in the attack. Pieces of human flesh, broken glass, lost shoes and vegetables from nearby carts were flung across the scene, and the seats of damaged cars were stained with blood.
A military official said that two Frontier Corps soldiers were injured, but that “we don’t know about any other losses”. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
In the northwestern tribal district of South Waziristan, a roadside bomb killed four people in the main town of Wana, officials said. In the North Waziristan tribal region, another roadside bomb targeting a security forces convoy killed four security officials and wounded 12 in the main town of Mir Ali, officials said. AFP
