KARACHI, 8 August 2004 — A car bomb exploded in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi yesterday, killing two people and wounding three, police said.
The 3-kg bomb blew up outside a car rental shop in an affluent southern neighborhood, a Karachi police spokesman said. “We are trying to determine the motive behind the bombing.”
“The device was apparently placed in a car last night with a timer,” a senior police officer said.
The explosion, which occurred at around 6.30 a.m., gouged a 2-foot-deep crater in the pavement and damaged three cars, witnesses said.
Police and paramilitary rangers cordoned off the site.
All the victims worked at the car rental shop which counts government officials among its customers, shop owner Mohammed Akram said.
All three wounded were in serious condition, doctors said.
“I lost control of my car and hit another vehicle because of the explosion,” said Mohammed Nasir, an engineer who was driving to his office.
Abdul Karim, who lives in a nearby building, said he was offering morning prayers when he heard the “deafening blast”.
“I became almost deaf for a few moments,” he said. “The explosion smashed windows in my flat.”
The car rental business is owned by Haji Akram. “I have no enemy in the city... I don’t know who put the bomb outside my shop,” Akram said.
Karachi, with a population of more than 14 million, has since the 1980s been a hotbed of ethnic and sectarian violence which reached alarming proportions in the mid-1990s.
Al-Qaeda and other anti-US militants began staging attacks on Western and Christian targets in reaction to Pakistan’s decision to join the US war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Pakistan has so far arrested and handed over more than 500 Taleban and Al-Qaeda fugitives to the US since the ouster of the radical Taleban regime in Afghanistan in the winter of 2001.
