Three Killed, Several Injured in Blast at UN Office in Islamabad
At least three people were killed and several others injured when a suspected suicide bomb exploded at an office of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, said police.
Pakistan is facing rage of Islamist militants who executed several bomb blasts in towns and cities to target the security forces as well as government and foreign targets.
Outside the tightly guarded WFP office in a residential area of the city, Tahri Alam, senior city police official, told reporters that three people were killed in the blast, including two women.
Another senior police official Bin Yameen said that one of the dead was an Irani national while other two were Pakistani women. Five Pakistanis were wounded in explosion, he said.
He said that a severed head and two legs were discovered from the site, indicating that the strike was launched by a suicide bomber. Needless to mention, suicide bombers often strap explosives to their torsos, which are obliterated in the blast, leaving severed heads and legs.
The WFP provides food to millions of impoverished Pakistanis. The agency was recently involved in providing relief to about 2 million people displaced by an army offensive against militants in the Swat valley, northwest of the capital.
“I went to my office on the first floor and as I sat on my chair there was a huge blast,” WFP official Arshad Jadoon told Reuters outside the office. “All of a sudden, a smoke cloud enveloped the building and we came out where wounded people were lying.”
Two foreign UN workers were killed in a suicide car bomb attack on a hotel in the northwestern city of Peshawar in June.
The army has made significant progress against militants in the Swat valley and elsewhere in the northwest and Interior Minister Rehman Malik says the back of the Pakistani Taliban has been broken.
But the militants have struck back with several bomb attacks in recent days as the army prepares to launch an offensive on the Pakistani Taliban’s main bastion in the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border.
