Pakistan Hotel Bicycle Bomb Kills 11
A powerful remote-controlled bicycle bomb exploded at a busy northwestern Pakistan hotel on Thursday, killing at least 11 people, wounding 14 and destroying the building.
The device went off in the evening as dozens of people were gathered after breaking the day's fast. Like the rest of the Muslim world, Pakistan is observing the holy month of Ramadan, when the faithful fast from dawn to dusk.
The bomb was planted on a bicycle parked in the front courtyard of the hotel in the town of Nowshera, police said.
Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the information minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told reporters at the site that 11 people had been killed and 14 injured in the blast.
Hayatullah Khan, a senior police officer who was also at the chaotic scene, told Agence France Presse that the dead included two army and one air force personnel.
"A woman and a child were also killed in the attack," he said. "It was a remote-controlled bomb. The bomb disposal squad are collecting more evidence."
Pakistan private TV channels aired footage showing the debris of the hotel and nearby shops destroyed in the blast. Blood could be seen scattered at the hotel's front along with damaged wooden chairs.
Mohammad Hussain, a senior police officer in Nowshera, told AFP: "The hotel was destroyed along with an adjacent hotel. Six nearby shops were badly damaged."
Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani condemned the attack in a statement and reiterated his government’s resolve to stamp out the menace of militancy and terrorism from the country.
"Those playing with the lives of the innocent people have no religion and no faith, they are following their own nefarious designs," he said.
Nowshera is 50 kilometers northeast of Peshawar, the capital of troubled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Last week, 51 people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a crowded mosque in Khyber tribal district, also in the violent and militant-infested northwest, in Pakistan's deadliest attack for three months.
The nuclear-armed Muslim country has suffered years of deadly violence blamed on Taliban and al-Qaida-linked networks.
U.S. special forces killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden on May 2 in Pakistan.
The northwest suffers from chronic insecurity largely connected to the semi-autonomous tribal belt near Afghanistan which Washington calls the most dangerous place on Earth and a global headquarters of al-Qaida.
More than 4,550 people have been killed in suicide attacks and bomb explosions in Pakistan during the last four years, many of them carried out by the Taliban and other al-Qaida-linked Islamist extremists.
Source: Agence France Presse
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