ISLAMABAD: A bomb ripped through a busy marketplace in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Sunday, killing at least 40 people and injuring dozens of others, hospital officials said, in the latest bloody attack to hit Pakistan after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif proposed peace talks with the Taliban-led militants.
Jameel Shah, a spokesman for Peshawar's Lady Reading Hospital that was treating many of the victims, said that Sunday's bomb went off in the vicinity of a police station near the Qissa Khawani bazaar. It occurred just one week after twin suicide bombings targeting a Sunday church service in Peshawar claimed over 80 lives.
Mr. Sharif, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, defended his policy of opening peace talks with the Taliban, saying the militant group's leadership "disowned" the Peshawar church bombings, which had been claimed by a Taliban offshoot.
He also, however, set his conditions for any agreement, saying that the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, must recognize the country's constitution and lay down arms. The Pakistani Taliban are separate from the Afghan Taliban, who are also based in Pakistani tribal areas near the Afghan border but don't generally target the Pakistani state. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Sunday's blast.
Peshawar is the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which abuts Pakistan's tribal areas. Hasan Askari Rizvi, an independent Pakistani defense analyst based in Lahore, said Sunday's attack bore TTP's signature. "There appears to be a consensus this is TTP," he said. "Peshawar, being next door to the tribal areas, it is more vulnerable than any other city in Pakistan."
Men carried a victim at the site of an explosion in Peshawar on Sunday. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, leads a coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and has long been advocating peace talks with the Taliban while also stridently campaigning against U.S. drone strikes in tribal areas. Ayesha Gulalai Wazir, a PTI member of Pakistan's National Assembly, suggested in a televised interview with local Geo News that Sunday's attack was a conspiracy to derail the peace talks. "Peshawar is being targeted because there are some powers that do not want negotiations to succeed," she said.
In an interview aired on several Pakistani television channels, Peshawar Police Bomb Disposal Squad's Assistant Inspector General Shafqat Malik said Sunday's attackers apparently set off an explosives-packed car that was parked near an inn. "Looking at the crater and the damage, they used between 200 and 225 kg [440-496 lb] of explosives," he said. "Our initial assessment is that this was a remote-controlled bomb."
Nasir Khan, the owner of a stationery and textbook shop in the marketplace, said the rigged car was parked a few yards away from his shop. "There was a really loud explosion," he said. "There was thick, black smoke everywhere and I couldn't see anything. There were a few seconds of complete silence, and then people started to scream."
Mr. Khan said the blast set alight books in a van employees had been unloading outside his shop. When he went into the smoke-filled street, he saw cars on fire and damaged shops.
"I wasn't wounded, but outside there was blood and debris everywhere," he said. "It is difficult to comprehend."
Bashir Ahmed Khan, who owns a small, traditional cap shop in the bazaar, said he was deeply shaken by the explosion. "There is so much damage to the shop," he said. "I've lost so much. I'm stunned, I can't even think or speak right now."
In addition to the Taliban violence that claimed tens of thousands of lives since 2001, Pakistan is grappling with a separate, ethnic, insurgency in its vast, sparsely populated province of Baluchistan. There, Pakistani troops sent to bring in relief supplies and search for survivors after Tuesday's powerful earthquake have come under attack from separatist Baluch insurgents this weekend.
A Pakistani military spokesman said in a statement that a convoy of Frontier Corps troops carrying rations for earthquake victims came under fire on Saturday near the town of Panjgur. Four soldiers were killed in the ambush, the military said.
Aftershocks, including a major tremor on Saturday, continued to hit the affected region. An official in the Baluchistan Provincial Disaster Management Authority's control room said Sunday that the toll from the massive earthquake had risen over the weekend to 375 dead and 815 injured.
According to the latest estimates released by Pakistani authorities, the earthquake affected 185,000 people.
Attacks on military relief operations in Baluchistan have underscored long-standing grievances in the province, which holds much of the country's mineral wealth but remains relatively poor and underdeveloped.
"One of the things that this natural disaster has done is to raise awareness of exactly how backwards this area is—and how little that has been done in a province that is one of the richest in terms of natural resources," said Samina Ahmed, South Asia director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. "It's not surprising that there is antipathy."
