Islamabad: Thirty-eight people were killed and nearly 50 injured in a suicide attack during the funeral prayers of a police officer slain by militants in northwestern Pakistan on Friday.
The bomber blew himself up on Friday evening amidst hundreds of people attending the funeral prayers for Deputy Superintendent of Police Javed Iqbal Mastikhel, who was killed with three of his guards in a roadside bomb attack in the morning.
Caretaker Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz Khan said it was a suicide attack. The blast occurred as a police contingent was presenting a guard of honour to the slain police officer on the lawns of a school at Mingora, the main town of Swat district in the
North West Frontier Province.
Most of those killed and injured were policemen. Among the dead were Mingora's Station House Officer Habib Zaman, Mastikhel's son and a former provincial assembly member, officials said.
The injured, many of them in a critical condition, were rushed to hospitals in Saidu Sharif town. Doctors appealed to people to donate blood for the injured even as an emergency was declared in the hospitals. Officials said they feared the toll could rise further.
Mastikhel and his guards were killed when the van they were travelling in was targeted with a roadside bomb near the officer's home at Lakki Marwat town in the NWFP. Two other policemen were injured in that attack.
Curfew was imposed across Swat following the suicide bombing, the latest in a series of such attacks on security forces in northwestern Pakistan. The security forces are conducting a major operation in Swat against militant followers of radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah.
In a separate incident, an army convoy was targeted with a roadside bomb at Badhaber in Peshawar, the capital of the NWFP, though only a civilian was injured in the blast, police said.
No group claimed responsibility for the three bombings though such attacks are usually blamed on pro-Taliban militants active in the NWFP and nearby tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
Comments
0 comment