DERA ISMAIL KHAN, 20 March 2006 — Suspected militants blew up a police vehicle in Dera Ismail Khan, a town in the North West Frontier Province, yesterday killing seven people, including three policemen and three paramilitary troops.

The police vehicle was on a routine patrol on the outskirts of the town when the bomb apparently planted in a dusty road exploded as it passed over.

Dera Ismail Khan is close to the Waziristan tribal region where security forces have been battling Al-Qaeda-linked militants and their local supporters over the past two years.

“It was a remote-controlled bomb,” Daar Ali Khattak, district police officer, told reporters.

The Nazim of the city, Mukhtar Khan, told Arab News on telephone that militants who fled Miranshah and other parts of North Waziristan following the crackdown were creating problems in D. I. Khan and the neighboring town of Bannu.

Khattak said a passerby was among the dead and hospital officials said five people were wounded, including two women.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack but Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said militants were likely behind the blast.

A few hours later, a second bomb went off near the site of the first blast. A wall of a nearby government building collapsed, but there were no casualties, residents said. “It appears to be the spillover of what is going on in Waziristan,” Sherpao told Reuters.

Nearly 200 pro-Taleban militants have been killed in clashes with security forces in the North Waziristan tribal region this month. Many Al-Qaeda fighters and their Taleban supporters fled to the semi-autonomous tribal belt after US and Afghan opposition forces ousted the Taleban in Afghanistan in 2001.

Pakistani security forces have been trying to clear foreign militants from the area since 2004.

Khattak said security had been beefed up in Dera Ismail Khan and nearby Tank town over concerns of militant attacks. “We consider these towns as hot targets of the militants,” he said.

Police in Tank last week issued a warning to local authorities that militants could target government offices, buildings and vehicles in retaliation for the military’s crackdown in the tribal areas.