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Seven dead in Pakistan suicide blast: officials
AFP - Monday, January 5
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - - A teenaged suicide bomber attacked police in northwest Pakistan on Sunday as they investigated an earlier blast, killing seven people and wounding 28 others, officials said.
The attack took place on a busy road in the town of Dera Ismail Khan near the border with Afghanistan, where police were called to the scene of a minor grenade explosion, district coordination officer Syed Mohsin Shah told AFP.
Five police and two civilians were killed in the suicide attack, Shah said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, the latest in a wave of suicide and other attacks across Pakistan that have left more than 1,500 people dead in the past 18 months.
Many of those attacks have targeted police and security forces.
A member of the bomb squad called in to investigate told AFP that fragments of a suicide jacket and an unexploded hand grenade were found at the scene, adding that 10 to 15 kilos (22-33 pounds) of explosives were likely detonated.
"The bomber was between 15 and 18 years old," Shah said.
Ashiq Saleem, the chief of the main government hospital in Dera Ismail Khan, told AFP that a head and foot believed to belong to the suicide bomber had been brought in for analysis.
He said one of the two civilians killed was a local journalist.
President Asif Ali Zardari condemned what he called a "cowardly act of terrorism" and expressed his condolences to the families of those killed, in a statement carried by the Associated Press of Pakistan news agency.
Later, gunmen opened fire on an ambulance transporting one of the bodies from the hospital to the victim's home, wounding the driver and two of the victim's relatives, a local official said. The assailants fled the scene.
Dera Ismail Khan is on the edge of Pakistan's lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, where hundreds of extremists fled after the Taliban regime was ousted from power in Kabul in a US-led invasion in late 2001.
The army is battling in the tribal zones to flush out Taliban and Al-Qaeda linked militants, who Washington and Kabul say are using Pakistan as a staging area for cross-border attacks against foreign forces operating in Afghanistan.
Pakistani security forces working to clear the key northwest highway used by vehicles carrying supplies to foreign troops in Afghanistan on Sunday seized a truck packed with 1,000 kilos (2,200 pounds) of explosives, an official said.
The senior security official told AFP that the truck bomb could have been used to cause "many deaths".
Dera Ismail Khan is not far from South Waziristan, where eight militants were killed last week in two suspected US missile strikes.
The troubled town has also in the past been the scene of sectarian violence between Pakistan's majority Sunnis and minority Shiites.
Last August, 23 people were killed in a suicide blast at a hospital in Dera Ismail Khan where Shiites were protesting the death of a local man. In November, seven were killed in a suicide attack on a Shiite funeral procession.
Muslims are currently observing the mourning period of Muharram, during which sectarian attacks have occurred in the past. Muharram ends with Ashura, the holiest day in the Shiite calendar which this year falls on Wednesday.
But Shah said there had not been any Shiite processions taking place near the scene of Sunday's blast.
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