Market blast kills four in Pakistan

Source: THE HINDU

A bomb rigged to a cycle detonated in a south-western Pakistani town on Thursday, killing at least four people, police said.

Sixteen people were wounded in the blast, which ripped through a market in Sohbatpur in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest but most impoverished province, which is plagued by nationalist violence.

“It’s simply terrorism as the public was the target,” local police chief Fareed Ali Shah said.

Mr. Shah himself survived a roadside bombing in the nearby town of Dera Allah Yar on Tuesday.

No group claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack, but suspicion fell on ethnic Baloch separatists, who have been waging a low-key insurgency for years.

In a separate incident on Thursday, suspected Islamist militants attacked a NATO convoy of three tractor-trailers loaded with trucks, leaving three people injured in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi, police said.

The ambush took place before dawn on a main road in Karachi’s SITE industrial neighbourhood shortly after the vehicles set off for the Afghan city of Kandahar, their cargo of trucks destined for Western troops deployed in Afghanistan.

“Two gunmen on a motorcycle first lobbed a hand grenade and later fired shots at the trailers,” local police officer Shahid Chaudhry said. “Two drivers and one assistant suffered wounds; however, they were in stable condition.” Nearly 75 per cent of fuel and military supplies for the US and NATO forces fighting the Taliban insurgency in landlocked Afghanistan are ferried from Karachi’s port.

Apart from the key overland route that crosses Pakistan’s restive north-western region, some supplies are transported along a relatively safer highway in the country’s south-west.

Pakistani security forces are in the midst of an offensive against Taliban militants in their stronghold of South Waziristan, a tribal district near the Afghan border. It began in mid-October.

The military said on Thursday that troops killed four “terrorists” during a clearance operation at Ziaratzai Top near the Ahmedwam area there.

Nearly 700 militants and more than 90 soldiers have so far been killed in the fighting, according to figures released by the army.