Car Bomb Adds to Toll in Northwest Pakistan

Car Bomb Adds to Toll in Northwest Pakistan
By ISMAIL KHAN
Copyright by Reuters
Published: November 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/world/asia/11pstan.html?ref=global-home


PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The third bombing in three days tore through a crowded intersection in a town in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 34 civilians and offering a grim marker of the mounting violence around the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar.

The car bomb rocked a congested market in the town of Charsadda, a short distance from Peshawar, just as shopkeepers and vendors were about to close their businesses and large number of commuters were waiting at a nearby taxi stand. The blast damaged shops, vehicles and electricity cables, causing power failures in the area that hampered rescue work. About 100 people were wounded, some seriously.

“The terrorists, after failing to dent the government’s resolve to stamp out terrorism, are now targeting the civilians hoping to arouse public anger against the government,” said a senior minister for the North-West Frontier Province, Bashir Ahmad Bilour.

“We will chase them and fight them till the very end”, he added.

A district police officer, Riaz Khan, said explosives were planted in a car parked near the intersection. He said preliminary evidence pointed to a suicide attack, since body parts and sneakers of the suspected bomber were recovered from the site.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

The attack came one day after a suicide bomber in a rickshaw struck near a group of police officers, killing three people and wounding five others in Peshawar, a short distance from the site of Tuesday’s bombing. On Sunday, a mayor who had opposed the Taliban was among 12 people killed in a suicide attack in a cattle market in the village of Mattani, which is also close to Peshawar.

As the Pakistani army presses an offensive against Taliban militants in the lawless border area with Afghanistan, suicide bombers have stepped up attacks on civilians and police officers in northwest Pakistan in an attempt to shake the government.

In the most devastating recent attack, a car bomb gutted a crowded market in Peshawar in late October as the United States secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, arrived in Pakistan for a visit. The blast killed more than 100 people, many of them women and children.

Jack Healy contributed reporting from New York.