ISLAMABAD — At least 25 people were killed and 40 injured yesterday when a suicide bomber struck an Awami National Party (ANP) election rally in Charsadda. North West Frontier Province Chief Minister Shamsul Mulk called it a suicide attack and said that at least one police officer was killed.

“We blame the government for not providing sufficient security,” said ANP spokesman Zahid Khan. He said that the police had found the severed head of the suspected bomber.

Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz added a man who got “very close to the stage” where party officials were assembled carried out the attack.

The blast went off inside a hall where about 200 supporters of the ANP, a secular, ethnic Pashtun group, had assembled.

Abdul Waheed, 22, who suffered burns from the blast, told The Associated Press from his hospital bed in the nearby city of Peshawar that the bomb went off as an ANP member was reciting verses from the Qur’an. He said he did not see the bomber. “I only heard the blast and cries and then something hit me and I fell down,” he said.

Nawaz said extremists were threatening all political parties in the province ahead of the Feb. 18 parliamentary elections. “They are against everyone,” he told Dawn News TV.

Afrasiab Khattak, the party’s provincial leader and a prominent human rights champion, was addressing the rally at the time but escaped unhurt.

This is the third suicide attack in Charsadda in recent months. More than 50 people died there in December last year when a suicide attacker detonated a bomb amid hundreds of worshippers at a mosque at the residence of former Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao. Sherpao was unhurt.

Days later, opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed in a suicide attack in the northern city of Rawalpindi, an attack the government has since blamed on Taleban militant commander Baitullah Mehsud. Taleban militants have also attacked CD stores, electronics shops and colleges for women.

Television footage of the aftermath of yesterday’s bombing showed the hall, located in the sprawling residence of a party activist, littered with bloodstained clothes, shoes, police caps and wrecked chairs.

— With input from agencies