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Blast kills 14 as terror strikes Peshawar again

By Manzoor Ali 2016-03-17
PESHAWAR: A bomb ripped through a bus carrying government employees on Wednesday, killing 14 people and injuring 55 others on a busy road in the cantonment area, doctors and officials said.

A wounded passenger told Dawn that minutes before the explosion several government employees working in the Civil Secretariat had stepped off the bus near the Peshawar Central Prison. Police said that the perpetrator might have gotten off the bus after leaving the bomb in a bag.

The explosive device, weighing 5-6kg and attached to a time device, was placed beneath a seat in the middle of the bus, the head of the Bomb Disposal Squad, Shafgat Malik, said.

`It had ripple effect,` he said, likening it to a similar bombing of a bus carrying government employees in September 2013which had left 19 people dead and more than 40 wounded.

`The modus operandi is the same,` Mr Malik said.

The banned Lashkar-i-Islam accepted responsibility for Wednesday`s blast.In June 2012, in a similar blast in a bus carrying government employees 20 people lost their lives.

The explosion was so powerful that it turned the 52-seat bus into a heap of mangled iron and rescue worl
Doctors at the city`s largest health facility, the Lady Reading Hospital, said 10 bodies were brought there, while an injured died later. Three bodies were taken to the PeshawarCantonment Hospital, just a few metres away from the scene of the bombing.

Among the injured were three women, a child and 39 men. Four employees of the Palcistan Air Force were among the injured. They were later shifted to the Combined Military Hospital.

The Senior Superintendent of Police operations, Peshawar, Abbas Majeed Marwat, said that the bus had started its run from Dargai area of Malakand, and after travelling through Mardan and Charsadda and on Motorway had arrived inPeshawar.

The Capital City Police Officer, Mubarakzeb, said that there were standard operating procedures for public transport and senior officials regularly visited bus stands to review security arrangements, but it appeared that SOPs were not followed in this case.

A government official acknowledged that there were no SOPs for around 20 such buses used for government employees. `It is a private arrangement and the government has nothing to do with it, he said.Noor Ali Gul, who works at a bakery, said it was a very powerful blast which jolted the area.

`I saw a bus running at full speed, with smoke billowing out of it, while its driver was slumped over the steering wheel,` he said.

He said the bus hit concrete road blocks placed in front of a police station and stopped. `It was a bloodbath inside the bus.

Atta Mohammad, an injured employee of PDA, said that he boarded the bus at Tarujaba and was sitting in the front portion.

He said that many people got off the bus near Central Prison.

`A huge bang jolted the bus near Sunehri Masjid and it was filled with smoke,` he said, adding that he fell unconscious and only regained consciousness while being rescued.

An official said that although the government had not received any specific threat, an alert on March 8 had warned of attacks on soft targets.

The Lashkar-i-Islam group said the bombing was meant to avenge ratification of death sentence by the army chief of 13 terror convicts and the military operation in the tribal region.

`This was our revenge against ratification of death sentence of 13 convicts by the military chief and the military operation,` its chief Mangal Bagh told Dawn, calling from an Afghan phone number.

Mangal Bagh`s LI once held sway in the adjoining Bara region in Khyber Agency before its eviction in a military operation. He is now based just across the border in Afghanistan, along with many other Pakistani militant groups evicted from their safe havens in the tribal region.