ISLAMABAD — A car bomb blast tore through a crowded market
in a city near Peshawar Tuesday and killed 34 people, the third terrorist
attack to strike the area in three days.
The blast occurred in Charsadda, about 25 miles northeast of
Peshawar. More than 50 people were injured in the suspected suicide bombing,
said Charsadda police official Riaz Khan.
As Pakistani troops continued to battle Taliban militants in
the South Waziristan region along the Afghan border, authorities have failed to
stem the tide of retaliatory violence that militants have inflicted on the
country.
The northwest city of Peshawar, located on the edge of
Pakistan’s largely lawless tribal areas, has been hardest hit by the violence.
The blast in Charsadda was preceded by a suicide bomb attack
on a motorcycle rickshaw that killed three people in Peshawar on Monday, and a
suicide bomb blast at a cattle market in the village of Adazai killed the
village’s mayor and 17other people Sunday.
On Oct. 28, a car bomb blast at a crowded women’s bazaar in
Peshawar killed 118 people, many of them women and children. And an Oct. 9
suicide car bomb blast in at a Peshawar market claimed 53 lives.
Shifting tactics, militants are no longer focusing suicide
bomb strikes on police and security installations, instead broadening their hit
list to include busy city markets where it is extremely difficult to scrutinize
every person and car.
“They have started targeting public places,” said
North-West Frontier Province Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain. Peshawar
is the province’s capital. “They are punishing innocent people for
supporting the army operation (in South Waziristan). But the people will not
lose hope.”
Peshawar is especially vulnerable because of its proximity
to tribal districts such as the Khyber and Orakzai regions where many Taliban
militants remain holed up. Peshawar police officials say they have tightened
security on roads leading in to the city and ramped up the number of
checkpoints, but the measures appear to have had little effect.
Speaking to Pakistan’s parliament Tuesday, Prime Minister
Yusaf Raza Gilani said the government should reallocate more funding to the
North-West Frontier Province, which is bearing the brunt of the militant
violence.
“We are fighting a guerrilla war,” Gilani said.
“These terrorist attacks are a reaction to our success” in South
Waziristan.
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
