Suicide Blast Kills 25 in Pakistan

Suicide Blast Kills 25 in Pakistan
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: September 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/world/asia/19pstan.html?ref=global-home


ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — At least 25 people were killed Friday in a suicide car bomb attack in a Shiite market town in northwest Pakistan, and at least 36 others were wounded, a police commander said.

The powerful explosion shook the town of Kohat, flattening a two-story hotel and a number of shops at a nearby bazaar. Rescue teams worked through the afternoon to pull victims from the rubble.

The bomb contained more than 300 pounds of explosives, said Ali Hassan Khan, the police commander of Kohat.

A crowd of Shiite residents in the town, angry at the failure of the police to provide security in their vulnerable neighborhoods, attacked a police car with rocks when it arrived at the scene of the blast on Friday.

Kohat, the capital of a district by the same name, is in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province and about 30 miles south of the volatile city of Peshawar. It lies about 100 miles west of the capital, Islamabad.

The Kohat District is predominantly Sunni Muslim, and its outlying areas have long served as a haven for Taliban fighters. But there are a number of Shiite communities in the district as well, and sectarian violence there has been chronic and deadly. Recent operations by the police and government security forces against Taliban militants have further heightened tensions in the district.

The News International, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, reported the arrests of 22 suspected Taliban insurgents on Monday — along with the seizure of dozens of weapons and 11 pounds of hashish — followed by eight more arrests on Thursday.

The police also demolished the houses of two fugitive insurgents in the district, the paper said, which resulted in the reprisal bombing of the home of a member of a pro-government militia.

Also Thursday, a bomb that had been planted in a container of clarified butter exploded in a Kohat electronics shop, wounding at least three people. Five neighboring shops were also destroyed in the blast.

Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Hong Kong.