ISLAMABAD, 18 December 2007 — A suicide bomber killed 10 Pakistani military recruits in the northwestern town of Kohat yesterday, the military said, the first major attack since emergency rule was lifted two days ago.
The bombing was near an army-run school where militants in recent months have made repeated attacks, which President Pervez Musharraf cited as among reasons for imposing a state of emergency on Nov. 3.
On Saturday, hours after lifting emergency rule and restoring the constitution, Musharraf said the government had “broken the back” of the militancy.
In yesterday’s attack, nine soldiers were killed instantly and one died later in the hospital, a military official said. Three soldiers were wounded, two of them seriously. “The bomber was on foot and blew himself up as he got close to the soldiers who were returning from a football ground,” said military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad.
Investigators later recovered the severed head and legs of the bomber.
“He is clean-shaven and appears to be 19 or 20 years old,” a police official said. More than 400 people have been killed in suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan in recent months, most in the North West Frontier Province. Many militants took refuge in remote northwestern area on the Afghan border after US-backed troops ousted the Taleban in Afghanistan in 2001. They have been conducting raids into Afghanistan and Pakistan from their mountain strongholds.
Meanwhile, a World Health Organization team headed for Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province yesterday to investigate how eight people were infected with bird flu, after the country reported its first human death from the virus.
Health officials confirmed at the weekend that eight people had tested positive for H5N1 in the province since late October, of which one person, who worked in a poultry farm, died.
A brother of the dead person, who had not been tested, also died. It was not yet clear if he was a victim of bird flu.
“The team will investigate whom the affected people were in contact with, whether they visited poultry farms or affected persons,” Health Secretary Khushnood Akhtar Lashari told Reuters.
“The other people tested positive were not from the poultry farm. Five of them have recovered while two were still being treated.” No more new cases have been reported in the last two weeks.
Humans rarely contract H5N1, which is mainly an animal disease. But experts fear the strain could spark a global pandemic and kill millions if it mutates to a form that spreads more easily.
The three-member WHO team, joined by officials from the Pakistan National Institute of Health, will visit Peshawar, where patients were treated, and Abbottabad, where authorities reported the last H5N1 virus case in wild birds on Nov. 30.
Bird flu first appeared in Pakistan in early 2006, and several outbreaks of H5N1 were reported this year.
