A FEMALE suicide attacker and a handcart bomb targeted Pakistani police today, killing seven people in the first deadly attacks to hit the northwest during Ramadan, officials said.
Peshawar, where the bombs struck, is on the frontline of a Taliban insurgency and borders Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt that Washington calls the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.
It was only the third time police have confirmed a woman suicide attacker in the country of 167 million where Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked bombers have killed 4,500 people since 2007, destabilising the government.
Dozens were wounded in today’s attacks, carried out several hours apart in the Lahori Gate area of Peshawar, a teeming city of 2.5 million, targeting first a police van and secondly a police checkpost.
“This was a female suicide bomber aged around 17 or 18 who threw a hand grenade on the police checkpost, 20 metres away from the site of the first blast, and then blew herself up,” police official Shafqat Malik told reporters.
“Her vest did not explode completely. She was killed and another woman was also killed and three policemen were injured,” Malik said.
There was initial confusion on whether the second woman was also carrying explosives, but police and medics later said she had not.
“The other woman is more than 60 years old. Her face is completely disfigured and beyond identification. Her body has no sign of wearing a suicide vest. We feel that she was just a passer-by,” Doctor Rahim Afridi told reporters.
He said 16 people were admitted with injuries after the second blast, including a 10-year-old boy.
Police official Imtiaz Shah confirmed that the other woman was a passer by and had no connection to the woman, believed to have been around 17 years old.
In late June, the Pakistani Taliban claimed for the first time that a married Uzbek couple carried out a suicide attack on a police station that killed 10 officers and threatened further husband-and-wife bombings.
Police said five officers and a child were killed earlier when a bomb hidden in a handcart on the roadside tore through a passing police van carrying 20 personnel at 7:10 am (0210 GMT), updating an initial death toll of five.
Eighteen other people were wounded, said police official Muhammad Faisal.
Shattered glass, human flesh, blood and police uniforms littered the area after the bomb, a reporter said.
“The police van was carrying 20 policemen,” said Imtiaz Shah, another police official, adding the vehicle was wrecked and that a group of schoolboys had been in the area when the bomb exploded.
“A 12-year-old boy has also been killed,” he said.
Witness Mohabbat Khan, 45, told reporters that volunteers helped police evacuate the casualties after the attack, after he saw clouds of smoke and dead bodies littered on the ground.
