PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) –
A twin suicide attack tore through a police compound in Pakistan on Friday, killing 11 people and heightening public anger over security breaches behind a wave of recent attacks.
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed power with a weak government on the frontline of the US-led war on terror, has been battered by assaults that have left more than 170 people dead in 11 days. Timeline of attacks
A woman suicide bomber on a motorbike and a car bomber unleashed fresh chaos Friday, detonating near a police investigations office in a garrison area of the northwestern city of Peshawar, bringing down a side of the building, police said.
"Police tried to intercept a woman sitting on a motorcycle ... She blew herself up and after that there was another blast when a suicide attacker sitting in a car exploded," said Liaqat Ali Khan, city police chief.
It was only the second suicide bomb attack by a woman in Pakistan. The twin blasts flung human limbs across the street, splattering blood on the ground and scattering shoes, said an AFP reporter.
"There are two women and a child among the dead. The car exploded close to the police building. The building was badly damaged," Sahibzada Mohammad Anees, the top administrative official, told reporters.
Officials said that 11 people were killed in all, including three policemen, and that seven wounded were in critical condition.
The blood-soaked identity card of a second-grade school boy lay on the ground as rescue workers pulled bodies and the wounded from the rubble.
The main gate of the two-storey police Central Investigation Agency building was destroyed, the upper portion of a mosque on the premises was damaged and a crater was punched out of the road in front, an AFP reporter at the scene saw.
"First I saw a blue flame then a loud explosion. When I got there I saw six bodies lying on the ground. I helped gather up body parts," witness Saadat Changhzi told AFP.
Home to 2.5 million Pakistanis, Peshawar is the largest city in the northwest and lies on the edge of the lawless tribal belt where Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants sheltered after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
Critics rounded on the civilian authorities for being unable to act on intelligence to prevent militants, some in their teens, from blasting their way into police offices on Thursday and trading fire for up to three hours.
At least 40 people died Thursday in a string of assaults on security buildings in Lahore, at the heart of the country's political heartland, and in bombings in the northwest.
Residents in Lahore, the cultural capital noted for its secular elite, asked how militants could have penetrated so far and so easily from their sanctuaries in the deeply conservative tribal belt on the Afghan border.
At least 10 attackers blasted their way into the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) branch in Lahore, a police academy in the suburb of Manawan and an elite commando school on the outskirts.
Militants had already carried out bloody attacks on the Manawan academy in March this year and on the FIA building in March 2008.
"The second attack on Manawan was a major security lapse," a former member of parliament for the district, Khalid Javed Ghukri, told AFP. "People are scared of coming out of their houses."
The press was also scathing over the security lapses that allowed attackers to reportedly climb a wall into the commando school on Thursday and besiege army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi at the weekend.
"In times of war there can be no room for mistakes, especially ones that lead to death and destruction on this scale," wrote The News newspaper.
Police said dozens of people had been picked up in overnight raids in slum areas of Lahore and neighbourhoods populated by Afghans.
Although there was no formal claim of responsibility, suspicion has fallen on Pakistan's Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) movement and Al-Qaeda, as well as homegrown Islamist groups Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Muhammad.
Officials have blamed militants from South Waziristan in Pakistan's tribal belt where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are believed to have carved out safe havens and where an imminent military offensive is expected.
