Islamabad, April 28: A suicide car bombing Wednesday at a police checkpoint killed four officers in Pakistan’s north-western city of Peshawar, security and health officials said.
City police chief Liaquat Ali Khan said the bomber targeted a checkpoint on the outskirts of Peshawar, the capital of the militancy-plagued Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province.
“They wanted to enter the city, but when the police stopped them for a search, they realized that they could not go any further and blew up the car there,” Mr. Khan said. “All four policemen who stopped the car died at the scene while six more security personnel are wounded.” A health official at Peshawar’s state-run Lady Reading Hospital said the bodies of four policemen and 13 injured people had been moved there.
“Among the injured are three civilians, including a woman, and 10 policemen,” the official said.
The blast flattened the checkpoint building and damaged several nearby houses.
No one had claimed responsibility for the predawn attack, but Taliban and al-Qaeda militants have killed hundreds of people in suicide and other attacks on official and civilian targets in the area in recent months.
Peshawar borders the country’s mountainous tribal region, where Islamist insurgents control large swathes of territory.
Thousands of Pakistani military and paramilitary troops are fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in this lawless tribal region, which Washington describes as a hub of global terrorism and the most dangerous place on earth.
In a security action Tuesday, soldiers killed five militants and seized 18 more in the Khyber district, which adjoins Peshawar.
Seven more rebels died Tuesday during a raid on a security check post in the Orakzai tribal region just south of Peshawar, where clashes over the past month have killed more than 400 insurgents, according to official data.
—-Agencies