ISLAMABAD/PESHAWAR: At least 22 people were killed and dozens wounded when two bomb blasts struck crowded markets in northwest Pakistan yesterday as shoppers prepared for the Eid Al-Adha festival.
Most of the victims died when an explosives-laden car blew up in a busy marketplace in the heart of Peshawar, the capital of the violence-hit province bordering Afghanistan.
The blast, which killed 16 people and wounded more than 70, occurred just hours after six people died in a car bomb explosion at a market in the semi-autonomous Orakzai tribal district near Peshawar.
Neither the motive nor the culprits behind the last evening blast in Peshawar were clear. But provincial government chief Haider Khan Hoti said “external forces” could be to blame — a comment understood in Pakistan to mean India. The Orakzai blast occurred in an area dominated by the Shiite community with a history of sectarian violence.
The Peshawar blast tore through a hotel and several adjoining buildings, destroying shops and causing panic among crowds of shoppers ahead of the Eid, police said.
It went off just outside a Shiite mosque in the city’s main Qisakhawani bazaar which was packed with shoppers, police said, but it was not clear if the mosque was the target. “The blast was so powerful that it caused five-foot deep crater,” police chief Malik Naveed told reporters at the site, adding up to 25 kilograms of explosives were used in the blast, he said.
The narrow lanes of the historic bazaar were littered with human limbs and charred bodies, witnesses said. Ambulances rushed to the scene to take away the dead and the wounded, who included women and children.
“It shook the entire area like an earthquake,” said resident Rahim Gul as he tried to remove rubble with his bare hands. “It was a huge and terrible explosion. As we reached here it was all burning. There was rubble all around.”
Khizar Hayat, the chief doctor at the city’s main government hospital, said at least 20 people had been killed and 50 wounded, 20 of them seriously.
Earlier yesterday, a suicide car bomb killed at least six people in an attack apparently aimed at Shiites in the Orakzai ethnic Pashtun tribal region.
The bomber drove toward the scene of a tribal council meeting, or Jirga, called by Shiites to settle a dispute with majority Sunni Muslims.
A government official said seven people had been killed in the attack in Kalaya, the main town in Orakzai.
Meanwhile, a missile strike by a suspected US drone killed at least three militants yesterday in a tribal district known to be a stronghold of Al-Qaeda and the Taleban, an official said. “A missile fired by a suspected US drone killed three people outside the town of Mir Ali in Miranshah tribal district,” a senior security official told AFP.
Local officials confirmed the strike and said it targeted the houses of a suspected Taleban militant north of Mir Ali. Two people were also injured in the attack. Taleban militants immediately surrounded the house and did not allow locals to come near the site, witnesses said.
— With input from agencies
