PAKISTAN: Fresh attacks leave 26 dead in Pakistan's frontier province

Record ID: 352518

  • Title: PAKISTAN: Fresh attacks leave 26 dead in Pakistan's frontier province
  • Date: 16th July 2007
  • Summary: COVERED BODY BEING WHEELED PAST CASUALTY WARD
  • Embargoed: 31st July 2007 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Pakistan
  • Country: Pakistan
  • Reuters ID: LVA95HAVC6UIG8R1P8JK9BXR3Z5H
  • Story Text: Twenty-six people were killed in a police recruiting centre in Pakistan's volatile North West Frontier Province (NWFP) on Sunday (July 15), bringing to 40 dead over the weekend in a surge of militant violence which officials said could be aimed at avenging the commando assault on a radical mosque in the capital last week.
    Also on Sunday, pro-Taliban militants in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border called off a 10-month peace deal with the government after accusing authorities of violating the pact.
    About 90 people, most of them paramilitary soldiers and police, have been killed in attacks in the northwest since July 3, when security forces in Islamabad surrounded the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, complex following clashes with gunmen.
    Commandos stormed the fortified mosque-school compound a week later killing 75 supporters of hardline clerics, most of them militant gunmen.
    Early on Sunday, 14 people, 11 of them paramilitary soldiers, were killed in a suicide-bomb ambush on a patrol in the scenic Swat valley in North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
    Hours later, a suicide bomber targeted a police recruiting centre in the city of Dera Ismail Khan, in the same province, killing 26, many of them young men taking a police entrance exam, police said. Dozens were wounded.
    Young men were waiting to have their documents checked before the police entrance exam when the bomber struck, leaving the centre in rubble and several vehicles damaged. Ambulances sent the dead and injured to a nearby hospital.
    Security analysts had expressed fears of a militant backlash over the Lal Masjid assault.
    Many of the militants at the mosque and many of the religious students who studied at the complex, were believed to have been from the NWFP.
    Pakistan's rugged northwest is a hotbed of al-Qaeda and Taliban support, U.S. military officers in Afghanistan say.
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