Suspected suicide blast in Pakistan kills 30 people

SUSPECTED suicide attackers detonated a car bomb yesterday that destroyed a police building and sheared walls off a nearby office of Pakistan’s top intelligence service in Lahore. About 30 people were killed and at least 250 wounded.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the attack — one of the deadliest in Pakistan this year — could be retaliation for the government’s military offensive to rout Taliban militants from the north-western Swat Valley.

Recent assaults in Lahore have heightened fears that militancy in Pakistan is spreading well beyond the north-west region bordering Afghanistan.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing. Police said two suspects were detained.

Raja Riaz, a senior minister in the Punjab provincial government, told reporters about 30 people were killed. At least nine police and several intelligence agents were among the dead, officials said.

The remainder of the dead and the bulk of the wounded were civilians caught in the blast in a busy section of the city.

Sajjad Bhutta, another senior official, told reporters more than 250 people were wounded.

“The moment the blast happened, everything went dark in front of my eyes,” witness Muhammad Ali said. “The way the blast happened, then gunfire, it looked as if there was a battle going on.”

Sajjad Bhutta, a senior government official in Lahore, told reporters a car carrying several gunmen pulled up on a street between offices of the emergency police and the intelligence agency.

“As some people came out from that vehicle and started firing at the ISI office, the guards from inside that building returned fire,” he said. As the shooting continued, the car exploded, he said.

A police call centre was reduced to rubble, and walls at a nearby office of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency collapsed.

An area nearly the size of a city block was destroyed, with cars left mangled and bricks strewn in all directions.