Suicide Bomber Strikes Peshawar Mosque, Police Station, 10 Dead

A day after three attacks on government buildings by gunmen and a suicide bomber strike, another suicide attacker exploded a car bomb at a mosque next to a police station in the northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar on Friday, killing 10 people.

So far no militant group has taken responsibility of attack but doubt fell on the Taliban, who have been blamed for two weeks of strikes that left over 150 dead across the country and appeared intended to force the government to abandon a planned offensive into the militants’ stronghold along the Afghan boarder.

Basher Khan, police official, said that the striker drove the explosives-laden vehicle into the wall of the mosque and blasted the bomb, badly damaging the mosque as well as abutting police station.

The aim of the strike in the main city in Pakistan’s Taliban-riddled North West Frontier province is yet not clear. The police station was heavily guarded and surrounded by barricades making it nearly impossible for any attacker to directly hit it.

Television footage showed the upper part of the wall of the brick mosque shorn off. Security forces swarmed the area as ambulances arrived at the scene. A twisted chunk of metal on the ground was in flames, and a small white car’s front section was destroyed. In nearby Lady Reading Hospital, rescue workers rushed wounded victims through the hallways on stretchers.

The blast killed 10 people, including two women and a schoolboy, and injured 11 others, said Sahibzada Mohammed Anis, a senior government official.