Police targeted in Pakistan suicide attack
At least five people are killed and dozens injured in an attack on a police station in the northwest of the country.
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| At least four people were killed in a rocket attack by rebels in southwestern Baluchistan province on Wednesday [AFP] |
A suicide car bomber has killed at least five people in northwest Pakistan.
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Thursday’s attack, which targeted a police station in Doaba town of Hangu district, left dozens wounded.
Rashid Khan, a senior police official, said the dead included an officer and four passers-by.
Hangu is part of the Khyber Pakhtunkhawa province and lies near the troubled tribal regions along the Afghan border where al-Qaeda, Taliban fighters and local rebels have flourished.
No group claimed responsibility for the attack, but Taliban fighters have regularly carried out attacks in northwest Pakistan in recent years.
Fighters linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban have waged a campaign of bomb and suicide attacks across Pakistan, mainly in the northwest, after the military launched major operations against their strongholds near the Afghan border in 2008.
Quetta attacks
Earlier, suspected tribal fighters fired four short-range rockets in different parts of Quetta, capital of the southwestern Baluchistan province, late on Wednesday, killing four people, including two policemen, and wounding 18 people, police said.
Ethnic Baluch rebels have for decades waged a low-level uprising for greater autonomy and more control over the natural resources of the mineral-rich, but poorest, province of Pakistan.