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CHARSADDA, Pakistan: At least 50 people were killed
when a suicide bomber blew himself up Friday at a Pakistan mosque,
police said, in an attack apparently aimed at former Interior
Minister Aftab Sherpao.
The minister, a close ally of
President Pervez Musharraf and one of the country’s most vocal
opponents of Islamic militants, reportedly survived the attack,
which took place at a mosque inside his residential compound.
“At least 50 people have been
killed and dozens were injured in the attack,” district police
chief Feroz Shah told Agence France-Presse. “I fear the death toll
may rise further.”
He said injured people as well as
the bodies of the dead were still being taken to hospitals in and
around Charsadda, where the attack took place, and the nearby
provincial capital of Peshawar in Pakistan’s restive northwest.
“Naturally, Aftab Sherpao was
the target,” Sherpao’s spokesman Salim Shah said.
He said the former minister and
his son had survived the attack, which came as the Muslim faithful
were marking the Islamic holiday of Eid’l Adha.
“The bomber was among the
people, who were offering Eid prayers,” said provincial police
chief Muhammad Sharif Virk. “He was standing in the second row
behind the former Interior minister.”
Sherpao was slightly wounded in a
suicide attack in April at a political rally, when a bomber rushed
the stage after he had just delivered a speech.
It was the fourth suicide attack
to hit Pakistan since last Friday, a day before Musharraf lifted a
controversial state of emergency in the nuclear-armed Islamic
nation.
Musharraf cited the threat of
violence when he imposed emergency rule on November 3. But in a
speech to the nation after he lifted the emergency last Saturday, he
said the threat had been contained. “The wave of terrorism and
militancy has been stopped under the emergency and there has been
considerable improvement in the overall situation.”
The latest deaths would take the
year’s toll from militant attacks close to 750—more than half of
those since July, when the military raided a radical pro-Taliban
mosque in Islamabad, killing around 100.
--AFP
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