24 people died in bomb attacks at a secondary school and a crowded market in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan

Peshawar, Pakistan At least 24 people died in bomb attacks at a secondary school and a crowded market in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan, Monday, officials said. Those attacks, which occurred with a few hours time difference between one and another, making the number of victims killed in bombings in Pakistan’s northwest to 73 in three days. Suicide attacks last weekend, characterized by the Taliban killed 49 people in the town of Kohat.

On Monday evening in Peshawar market Qissa Khawani, a suicide bomb attacker walked into the crowd and blew himself up. An AFP reporter at the scene saw scattered shoes, pieces of body and car were destroyed. “Twenty-three people were killed, including three policemen. At least 27 people hospitalized longer,” said senior police official told AFP Imran Kishwar. Senior provincial ministers Bashir Bilour confirm that toll.

Shafqat bomb squad chief Malik told reporters the explosion was caused by an attacker wearing a bomb vest weighing six to eight kilograms. We have found the attacker’s head and feet,” he added. The blast came after protesters who marched against rising inflation and power outages left the area, said some police.

Several hours earlier, a boy who was eight years old were killed and at least 10 people were injured in a bomb attack outside a middle school in Peshawar. Police did not say who had put the bomb in a city hit by Taliban attacks. Bombing came after three suicide attacks within 24 hours killed 49 people in the town of Kohat, Pakistan’s northwest.

More than 3200 people died in suicide attacks and bombings in Pakistan in three years. The violence was blamed on Muslim militants opposed to alliance with the U.S. government. Pakistan’s increasing international pressure to crush militant groups in the region and the northwest tribal zone amid rising attacks cross-border rebel against international forces in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s tribal areas, particularly Bajaur, plagued by violence since hundreds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels fled to the region after the US-led invasion in late 2001 toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Pakistani forces launched air and ground offensive into the South Waziristan tribal region on October 17, with 30,000 soldiers who assisted jet fighter and helicopter guns.

Although there is resistance in South Waziristan, many officials and analysts believe that most of the Taliban insurgents had fled to neighboring areas of North Waziristan and Orakzai. North Waziristan is the stronghold of the Taliban, militants associated with Al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network, which is famous for attacking American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and the U.S. make that area as a target of missile attacks unmanned aircraft.

Some analysts have also warned that the Taliban and their allies will be stepped up attacks on security forces in Bajaur and other tribal areas to divert the focus of attention from South Waziristan. Security forces conduct large-scale operation against Islamic militants in the Mohmand and Bajaur in August 2008. In February 2009, the military said that net Bajaur after a fierce battle for months, but unrest continues.

According to the military, more than 1,500 militants have been killed since they launched an offensive in Bajaur in early August 2008, including Al-Qaeda’s operational commander in the area, Abu Saeed Al-Masri is an Egyptian. The area was also hit by a missile attack that almost about Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second person, in January 2006. U.S. forces declared, that border area is used for militant groups as a place to do training, a rearrangement of forces and launch attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan. ( AFP)

Pakistan A pair of suicide bombers targeting army vehicles detonated explosives within seconds of each other Friday

LAHORE, Pakistan A pair of suicide bombers targeting army vehicles detonated explosives within seconds of each other Friday, killing at least 39 people in this eastern city and wounding nearly 100, police said. It was the fourth major attack in Pakistan this week, indicating Islamist militants are stepping up violence after a period of relative calm.About ten of those killed were soldiers, said Lahore police chief Parvaiz Rathore.

The bombers, who were on foot, struck RA Bazaar, a residential and commercial neighborhood where several security agencies have facilities. Security forces swarmed the area as thick black smoke rose into the sky and bystanders rushed the injured into ambulances. Video being shot with a mobile phone just after the first explosion showed a large burst of orange flame suddenly erupting in the street, according to GEO TV, which broadcast a short clip of the footage shot by Tabraiz Bukhari.”Oh my God! Oh my God! Who are these beasts? Oh my God!” Bukhari can be heard shouting after the blast in a mixture of English and Urdu.Senior police official Tariq Saleem Dogar said 39 people were killed, and another 95 were hurt. Some of the wounded were missing limbs, lying in pools of blood after the enormous explosions, eyewitness Afzal Awan said.

“I saw smoke rising everywhere,” Awan told reporters. “A lot of people were crying.”No group immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicion quickly fell on the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida.The militants are believed to have been behind scores of attacks in U.S.-allied Pakistan over the last several years, including a series of strikes that began in October and lasted around three months, killing some 600 people in apparent retaliation for an army offensive along the Afghan border.In more recent months, the attacks were smaller, fewer and confined to remote regions near Afghanistan.But on Monday, a suicide car bomber struck a building in Lahore where police interrogated high-value suspects – including militants – killing at least 13 people and wounding dozens. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility.Also this week, suspected militants attacked the offices of World Vision, a U.S.-based Christian aid group, in the northwest district of Mansehra, killing six Pakistani employees, while a bombing at a small, makeshift movie theater in the main northwest city of Peshawar killed four people.The attacks show that the loose network of insurgents angry with Islamabad for its alliance with the U.S. retain the ability to strike throughout Pakistan despite pressure from army offensives and American missile strikes against militant targets.

The violence also comes amid signs of a Pakistani crackdown on Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida operatives using its soil. Among the militants known to have been arrested is the Afghan Taliban’s No. 2 commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.The Pakistani Taliban, meanwhile, are believed to have lost their top commander, Hakimullah Mehsud, in a U.S. missile strike in January. The group has denied Mehsud is dead but has failed to prove he’s still alive.

Militant attacks in Pakistan frequently target security forces, though civilian targets have not escaped.During the bloody wave of attacks that began in October – coinciding with the army’s ground offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in the South Waziristan tribal area – Lahore was hit several times.In mid-October, three groups of gunmen attacked three security facilities in the eastern city, a rampage that left 28 dead. Twin suicide bombings at a market there in December killed around 50 people.(AP)

bomb blast at a mosque in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt killed 29 people including some militants

PESHAWAR, Pakistan A bomb blast at a mosque in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt killed 29 people including some militants Thursday, underscoring the relentless security threat here even as Pakistani-U.S. cooperation against extremism appears on the upswing.The attack in Khyber tribal region came as U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke met with Pakistan’s prime minister in Islamabad, the capital. It also followed revelations that Pakistani authorities have been picking up Afghan Taliban leaders on their soil, a longtime U.S. demand.

The explosion tore through a mosque in the Aka Khel area of Khyber, killing at least 29 people and wounding some 50 others, local official Jawed Khan said. Earlier reports had said the blast occurred in the Orakzai area at a cattle market.The two areas border one another, and the market is apparently near the mosque.Officials were still investigating whether the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber or a planted device.No group claimed responsibility, but Khan said the dead included militants from Lashkar-e-Islam, an insurgent group in Khyber that has clashed with another militant outfit known as Ansarul Islam. Both espouse Taliban-style ideologies.Earlier this week, officials confirmed that a joint CIA-Pakistani security operation had captured the No. 2 Afghan Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.On Thursday, an Afghan official told The Associated Press that around the same time — some two weeks ago — two Taliban leaders from northern Afghanistan also were arrested in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities.The U.S. and Pakistan have said very little on the record about the arrests, but they could signal a shift in Pakistani policy. Pakistan has long frustrated the Americans by either denying that the Afghan Taliban use its soil or doing little to root them out.

The arrests could mean that Pakistan has decided to turn on the Afghan Taliban, a group that it helped nurture as a strategic ally against longtime rival India, though some suspect the Pakistanis were forced to act because the U.S. had solid intelligence on Baradar that it could not deny.The arrests came as Western and Afghan troops fight the Taliban for control of Marjah town in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told Holbrooke that the U.S. should take into account Pakistan’s concerns that the Marjah offensive could lead to Afghan refugees and militants heading to Pakistan’s southwest and northwest, according to Gilani’s office.

The pair also discussed U.S. humanitarian aid efforts, with Gilani pressing for a quicker release of funds. The U.S. has pledged $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over the next five years.Talking with reporters in Kabul on Wednesday, Holbrooke said the U.S. was restructuring the way it doles out aid to Pakistan and intends to consult more with the Pakistanis and pursue more visible projects.”It is very, very time consuming work because of the huge, long lead times of contracts, because of the congressional role,” he said.

Pakistan teror attack a warning to anti-Taliban tribes

Pakistani paramilitary soldiers

SHAH HASAN KHEL, Pakistan  A suicide car bombing that killed 88 people on a volleyball field sent a bloody New Year’s warning to Pakistanis who have formed militias to fend off Taliban insurgents in the northwestern region near the Afghan border.The attack on the outskirts of Lakki Marwat city was one of the deadliest in recent Pakistani history. As local tribesmen prepared for funerals Saturday, rescuers searched rubble for more bodies, and many in the area were too terrified to speculate who staged the assault.

The suicide bomber detonated some 550 pounds (250 kilograms) of high-intensity explosives on the crowded field in Shah Hasan Khel village during a volleyball tournament held Friday near a meeting of anti-Taliban elders. The elders, who had helped set up an anti-Taliban militia in the area, were probably the actual target, police said.

Lakki Marwat district is near South Waziristan, a tribal region where the army has been battling the Pakistani Taliban since October.
The military operation was undertaken with the backing of the U.S., which is eager for Pakistan to free its tribal belt of militants believed to be involved in attacks on Western troops in Afghanistan. The offensive has provoked apparent reprisal attacks that had already killed more than 500 people in Pakistan before Friday’s blast.

Militants have struck all across the nuclear-armed country, and they appear increasingly willing to hit groups beyond security forces. No group claimed responsibility for Friday’s blast, but that is not uncommon when many civilians are killed.Across Pakistan’s northwest, where the police force is thin, underpaid and under-equipped, various tribes have taken security in their own hands over the past two years by setting up citizen militias to fend off the Taliban.

The government has encouraged such “lashkars,” and in some areas they have proven key to reducing militant activity.Still, tribal leaders who face off with the militants do so at high personal risk. Several suicide attacks have targeted meetings of anti-Taliban elders, and militants also often go after individuals. One reason militancy has spread in Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal belt is because insurgents have slain dozens of tribal elders and filled a power vacuum.

Shah Hasan Khel village “has been a hub of militants. Locals set up a militia and expelled the militants from this area. This attack seems to be reaction to their expulsion,” local police Chief Ayub Khan told reporters.Mohammed Qayyum, 22, tried to avoid crying Saturday as he recounted how his younger brother died when the explosion shook the neighborhood. His family’s house was among the more than three dozen nearby mud-brick homes that toppled.”After the blast, I heard cries, I saw dust, and I saw injured and dead bodies,” said Qayyum, who escaped injury. “See this rubble, see these destroyed homes? Everybody was happy before the explosion, but today we are mourning.”

Like many others in the village that had prided itself on standing up to the militants, Qayyum refused to comment when asked who he thought was behind the bombing.

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton condemned the attack.”The United States will continue to stand with the people of Pakistan in their efforts to chart their own future free from fear and intimidation and will support their efforts to combat violent extremism and bolster democracy,” she said in a statement.Authorities said about 300 people were on the field at the time of Friday’s blast and security had been provided for the games and the tribal elders’ meeting. Police official Tajammal Shah said Saturday that 88 people died and 50 were wounded. Eight children, six paramilitary troops and two police were among the dead, he said.

Omar Gull, 35, a wounded paramilitary soldier, said the attacker drove recklessly into the crowd and people were trying to figure out what was happening when the explosives detonated. “It was then chaos,” he said.The attack was one of the deadliest in years, and the second deadliest since the latest wave of bloodshed began in October. A car bomb killed 112 people at a crowded market in Peshawar on Oct. 28.Regional Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain reiterated the government’s resolve to target militants wherever they may be, saying, “We need to be more on the offensive to fight them.”(AP)

Pakistan ISLAMABAD suicide bombing death toll rises to 8

Shiite Muslim

ISLAMABAD The death toll from a suicide bombing at a Shiite Muslim gathering in the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir increased to eight Monday, police said, as minority Shiites marked the key holy day of Ashura.Another 80 people were wounded in Sunday night’s bombing in Muzaffarabad – a rare sectarian attack in an area police say has little history of militant violence. The dead included three police, said police official Yasin Baig, adding that another 10 police were among the wounded.The suicide bomber set off explosives he was carrying as police searched him outside a ceremony commemorating the seventh century death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson during the Islamic holy month of Muharram.Security has been tightened across Pakistan during Muharram, and particularly for Monday’s Ashura, the 10th day of Muharram, a month of mourning that is often marred by bombings and fighting between Pakistan’s Sunni Muslim majority and its Shiite minority.

In the northwestern city of Peshawar, which has been repeatedly hit by suicide bombings in the past months, thousands of police were guarding processions, and troops were on standby, local police chief Liaqat Ali Khan said.

“Our security level is red alert,” Khan said, adding that the recent wave of attacks required police to be extra vigilant.

More than 500 people have been killed in attacks across Pakistan since October. Insurgents are suspected of avenging a U.S.-supported Pakistani army offensive against the Taliban in a northwest tribal region along the Afghan border.Maj. Aurangzeb Khan said paramilitary forces were deployed and were carrying out helicopter patrols in the southern port city of Karachi, where a blast that authorities attributed to a buildup of gas in a sewage pipe wounded about 30 people on Sunday.

“Our men will remain with all the processions till their culmination,” Khan said.To the east in Lahore, all entry and exit points to processions were blocked to traffic and anyone joining a procession had to pass through scanners, said police official Chaudhry Shafiq.

“There is always a threat, especially in the ongoing terror attacks,” Shafiq said.After Sunday night’s bombing in Kashmir’s Muzaffarabad, Baig, the police official there, said Shiite mourners at the commemoration ceremony took to the streets to protest the bombing, with some firing shots in the air. Baig said authorities restored order within about an hour.

He said it was the first time a suicide bomber attacked a Shiite gathering in the region.Muslim militants have fought for decades to free Kashmir, which is split between India and Pakistan and claimed by both, from New Delhi’s rule. But while Muzaffarabad has served as a base for anti-India insurgents to train and launch attacks, the capital – and most of the Pakistani side – has largely been spared any violence, with militants focusing on the Indian-controlled portion.

The bombing highlights the growing extremism of militants in Pakistani Kashmir. Many of the region’s armed groups were started with support from Islamabad. But some of them have turned against their former patrons and joined forces with the Taliban because the government has reduced its support under U.S. pressure.

The partnership is a dangerous development for Pakistan as it could enable the Taliban to carry out attacks more easily outside its sanctuary in the country’s tribal areas in the northwest. More than 500 people have been killed in retaliatory attacks since the military launched a major anti-Taliban offensive in mid-October in the militant stronghold of South Waziristan near the Afghan border.

A bomb exploded near an intelligence office Pakistan intel kills 12 people

bomb exploded near an intelligence

MULTAN, Pakistan A bomb exploded near an intelligence office in central Pakistan on Tuesday, authorities said, damaging the building and killing at least 12 people amid a surge of extremist violence that has prompted the U.S. to offer additional aid in the country’s battle against the Taliban and al-Qaida.

The bombing in Multan signaled a relentless determination on the part of the militants, who – despite being pressured by a major army offensive in one of their Afghan border havens – have sustained a retaliatory campaign since October that has killed more than 400 people. On Monday, bombings elsewhere in the country killed 59 people.

TV footage from Multan showed several severely damaged buildings in the neighborhood, some with their facades ripped off. Ambulances wailed as security forces flooded the zone, where a Federal Investigation Agency office was also located.

The apparent target of the blast was a building housing an office of Pakistan’s most powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Authorities still had not determined how the attack was carried out.

Rizwan Naseer, the official in charge of the area’s government-run emergency service, told a Pakistani news channel that the attack killed 12 people and wounded 30 people. It was not immediately clear how many were intelligence agents.

The attack came as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Washington was ready to work more closely with Pakistan as soon as Islamabad expressed willingness.

“The more they get attacked internally … the more open they may be to additional help from us. But we are prepared to expand that relationship at any pace they are prepared to accept,” he said.

Early Tuesday, suspected U.S. missiles struck a car carrying three people in the Taliban-riddled North Waziristan tribal region, two intelligence officials said. The region neighbors South Waziristan, the focus of the latest Pakistani army offensive, and is believed to be where many of the Taliban have fled to avoid the military onslaught. The identities of the three were not immediately clear.

All the intelligence officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Most of the militant attacks in recent weeks have been directed at security forces, though several have targeted crowded public spaces such as markets, apparently to create public anger and increase pressure on the government to call a halt to the South Waziristan offensive.

The Taliban generally claim responsibility for attacks on security officers, but not those that kill civilians, though they – or affiliated extremist groups – are suspected in all the strikes.

Late Monday, twin blasts and a resulting fire ripped through the Moon Market, a center in the eastern city of Lahore that is popular with women and sells clothing, shoes and cosmetics. Lahore police chief Pervaiz Lathore said Tuesday that the death toll in the blasts had reached 49, with more than 100 people wounded.

Authorities initially said both bombs at the market were believed to be remote-controlled, but they later said a suicide bomber was suspected to have detonated at least one of them.

Earlier Monday, a suicide bomber killed 10 people outside a courthouse in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Lahore is Pakistan’s second-largest city. It has been hit several times by militants over the past year, including an attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team and several strikes against security installations.

By attacking Lahore and Multan, militants are bringing their war to the heart of Pakistan. Both are cities in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, and one far from the northwest regions where al-Qaida and the Taliban have more easily proliferated.

Peshawar has been a more frequent target. The northwestern city lies on the main road into the lawless tribal belt. Of all the attacks since the start of October, the deadliest occurred in Peshawar, where at least 112 people were killed in a bombing at another market.

The rise in militant attacks comes amid growing political turbulence, especially regarding the future of President Asif Ali Zardari, a pro-U.S. leader hugely unpopular here.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court continued examining the legality of an amnesty protecting him and 8,000 other officials from graft prosecution. The amnesty expired last month, and judges must rule on whether to reopen corruption cases against them.

Although Zardari has immunity from prosecution as president, some experts say the court could now take up cases challenging his eligibility to run for office.