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Pakistan: new suicide attack claims more lives near Rawalpindi army HQ Pakistani Taliban suicide blast claims more lives near Rawalpindi army HQ
(about 3 hours later)
A suicide bomber killed 10 people in a crowded market on Monday near the Pakistani army headquarters in Rawalpindi, police said. The Pakistani Taliban have mounted another highly provocative attack on the country’s military with a suicide bombing near army headquarters.
Police official Sardar Zulfiqar told the Associated Press some security personnel were believed to be among the dead. The blast in a market in the garrison city of Rawalpindi on Monday killed 13 people, including a retired officer and five soldiers, the police said. Around 18 people were wounded.
The market, 10 minutes' walk from the army headquarters, is in one of the most secure areas of the city, said Rawalpindi police chief Akhtar Hayat Lalika. The area was cordoned off by the military immediately after the blast. The attack came a day after the army lost 20 members of the paramilitary Frontier Corps in one of the most devastating individual attacks by Islamist insurgents in Pakistan’s troubled north-west.
Lalika said 14 people were wounded. A senior policeman in Rawalpindi said a suicide bomber riding a motorbike rammed into a checkpoint just a short walk from the heavily fortified military complex on Monday morning.
Taliban spokesman Shahidullah Shahid claimed responsibility for the blast on behalf of the Islamist insurgents. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), as the large coalition of Islamist militants calls itself, claimed responsibility for the attack.
On Sunday a Taliban bombing killed 20 Pakistani soldiers near the tribal region of North Waziristan. Rawalpindi is a short drive from the capital of Islamabad, is home to General Headquarters, the institutional nerve centre of Pakistan’s half-million-strong army which is thought to be deeply frustrated by the lack of tough action against militant groups using violence to try to topple the state.
Sunday's attack prompted the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to cancel his trip to the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos. The powerful military establishment has called the shots in Pakistan for decades, seizing power from civilian governments three times since 1947. But recently the army has struggled to persuade politicians to mount a counter-terror crackdown, particularly in North Waziristan, a tribal area bordering Afghanistan that is largely controlled by al-Qaida-linked militant groups.
His government is keen to pursue peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban to end the insurgency but there has been an upsurge in attacks since Sharif won elections in May 2013. Although Nawaz Sharif’s seven months as prime minister has been punctuated by regular TTP attacks he has remained determined to try to negotiate with militants.
Most experts point out that militant groups have a long history of breaking local peace accords and the chances of talks yielding peace are negligible.
Leading opposition leader Imran Khan has kept up the pressure, however, insisting peace is possible only if Pakistan disassociates itself from US military operations in Afghanistan.
On Sunday the TTP spokesman Shahidullah Shahid said the movement was ready for “sincere and meaningful talks”.
His remarks came hours after a TTP bomb hidden on a truck killed 20 soldiers who were preparing to ride in convoy to a base in Bannu, part of a restive area known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The attack prompted Sharif to cancel a planned trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Shahid repeated preconditions for talks which the government would find virtually impossible to implement, including an end to US drone strikes and a withdrawal of all soldiers from the tribal areas.
Security analysts say the TTP has managed to sustain its ability to inflict violent strikes around the country despite the drone strike that killed its former leader late last year. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the troubled north-western province that borders FATA, has been the target of more than 40 attacks since the start of the year.