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Pakistan bombs targetted police and markets { January 15 2008 }

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   http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan15jan15,1,5668605.story?coll=la-headlines-world

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan15jan15,1,5668605.story?coll=la-headlines-world

10 die, 40 hurt in Pakistan bombing

The attack targets a makeshift Karachi market. Al Qaeda-linked militants are blamed. Analysts say the blast may give officials reason to further delay elections.
By Shahid Husain and John M. Glionna, Special to The Times
January 15, 2008

KARACHI, PAKISTAN -- Ten people were killed and more than 40 injured when a bomb exploded here Monday on a path crowded with food and vegetable vendors, police said.

The device, reportedly rigged to a motorcycle left near a fruit cart, rocked the working-class neighborhood in Pakistan's largest city, police said.

The rush-hour blast was the latest in a wave of violence, including the Dec. 27 assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and a suicide bombing in Lahore last week that killed 23 people, including policemen.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, which authorities say have been designed to create insecurity in the weeks before parliamentary elections now set for Feb. 18.

Government officials blame Al Qaeda-linked militants from tribal regions along the Afghan border. The bomb was detonated in an area dominated by Pashtun tribesmen who have moved to the city.

"This is a deplorable incident and very tragic," said Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz.

Monday's attack was the first deadly bomb blast in Karachi since October, when a suicide bomber killed at least 140 people at a rally for Bhutto upon her return to Pakistan after years of exile.

Analysts said the new attack was aimed at fomenting ethnic violence in the volatile city of 16 million and would give the government reason to further delay the elections.

The vote for parliament and provincial assemblies, originally scheduled for Jan. 8, was postponed in the wake of three days of rioting that broke out after the gun-and-bomb attack that killed Bhutto -- a former prime minister and the best-known opposition figure.

A gunman and a suicide bomber ambushed the 54-year-old politician as she left a rally in Rawalpindi, not far from the capital, Islamabad. Bhutto had called for a tougher stance against Islamic militants.

After her death, Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and the other main opposition group, the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, advocated that national balloting be held as scheduled in early January, but the government opted for a delay.

Tauseef Ahmed Khan, an associate professor of mass communications at Karachi's Urdu University, said continued violence throughout Pakistan plays into President Pervez Musharraf's hands.

"It allows the ruling party to cite unrest as a reason to further delay next month's elections," Khan said. "It further diverts the attention from Benazir Bhutto's assassination."

Musharraf was in Karachi on Monday to inaugurate a new road several miles from the bombing site, but authorities said they did not believe he was the target.

At a speech earlier in the day, he asserted that militants posed a threat to the country and said he was determined to weed them out.

"The president said . . . the nation would have to fight this menace jointly and boldly," Pakistani wire services reported.

The blast Monday sent nails and ball bearings through the air. Within an hour, dozens of people gathered at the site and chanted anti-government slogans. People also threw rocks and set fires in several Pashtun areas of the city.

A spokeswoman for Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center confirmed that at least three of those slain were children and that more than 40 other people were injured, seven of them critically.

Azhar Ali Farooqi, police chief of Sindh province, said the explosion was the result of "an improvised electronic device" planted beneath the seat of a motorcycle.

john.glionna@latimes.com

Special correspondent Husain reported from Karachi and Times staff writer Glionna from Lahore.



Bomb rips through pakistan prayer service { April 11 2006 }
Mosque ripped by bomb during packed service { October 1 2004 }
Pakistan bombs targetted police and markets { January 15 2008 }

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