PESHAWAR: A suicide bomber rammed a car into a mosque during Friday prayers, killing 11 people in the town of Timergara in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), police said.
The explosion struck a mosque next to local police headquarters in Lower Dir district, the focus of a spring military offensive to oust militants advancing closer towards the capital Islamabad.
Muhammad Idrees Khan, deputy inspector general of police in Lower Dir, told AFP that the blast hit a mosque next to local police headquarters.
‘Now it has been confirmed that it was a suicide attack. The bomber was riding a car and he rammed his car into the outer gate of the mosque,’ he said.
Local television showed images of a huge plume of smoke rising from a small town in the mountains, while charred cars smoldered beside the blast site.
‘We have received three more dead bodies taking the death toll to 11. There are 29 injured people with us, some of them in a critical condition,’ said Doctor Wakeel Mohammad Khan, head of main hospital in Lower Dir.
‘The local residents told me that some more dead bodies are laying in the houses — we have declared an emergency in the hospital.’
The injured included children, he added, but officials were unable to say how many police were killed or wounded in the attack.
More than 2,700 people have been killed in attacks in Pakistan since July 2007, with the past three months seeing a surge in suicide bombings targeting civilian and security targets by militants avenging the army onslaught.—AFP
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