Two people were killed and 14 others wounded when a suicide bomber
blew up his explosive-laden car near a police post in northwestern
Pakistan late Thursday, police said.
The blast, at a checkpost
near a police station in the Lakki Marwat district of troubled Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa province, damaged 12 shops and seven houses, local police
chief Gul Wali Khan told AFP.
Police signalled a suspect vehicle to stop and opened fire when the driver ignored the instruction, he said.
"The bomber detonated his car. Two civilians were killed when their house collapsed. It was a suicide car bomb attack.
"At
least 14 people, seven of them police officials, were wounded," he
said, adding that none of them were seriously hurt and all were out of
danger.
The incident happened as Pakistan celebrated the Muslim
festival of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of
Ramadan.
Lakki Marwat district borders South Waziristan, part of
Pakistan's militant-infested semi-autonomous tribal belt near
Afghanistan, which Washington calls the most dangerous place on Earth
and a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.
US special forces killed Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden on May 2 in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad.
The
northwest suffers from chronic insecurity largely connected to the
tribal belt and two weeks ago, 51 people were killed by a suicide
bomber in a crowded mosque in Khyber district, Pakistan's deadliest
attack for three months.
Last week 11 people were killed when a
remote-controlled bicycle bomb exploded at a busy hotel in Nowshera,
northeast of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The nuclear-armed Muslim country has suffered years of deadly violence blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked networks.
More
than 4,550 people have been killed in suicide attacks and bomb
explosions in Pakistan during the last four years, many of them carried
out by the Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist extremists. AFP
