15 dead in Lahore blast
At least 15 people were killed and several injured in a blast at the office of Pakistan’s federal investigation agency in the eastern city of Lahore today, the city police chief said.
“The explosion took place in the premises of Federal Investigation Agency’s office, killing 13 people and injuring several others,” Lahore police chief Malik Muhammad Iqbal told AFP.
Iqbal said he could not immediately confirm the nature of the blast.
A second bomb went off in a residential neighbourhood about 10km away, killing two children, said a city administrator, Mian Ejaz.
Television channels showed footage of a partially collapsed four-storey building and piles of blackened wreckage. It was not clear if the footage was of the investigation agency building or of nearby structures.
Police cordoned off the area while emergency workers carrying stretchers scrambled over the rubble.
The explosion comes one week after two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a prestigious naval college in Lahore, killing at least five people and injuring 19, officials said.
Pakistan has been rocked by six major blasts since elections on February 18, posing a serious challenge to an incoming coalition government led by the parties of slain ex-premier Benazir Bhutto and former premier Nawaz Sharif.
Pakistan has been combating an Islamist insurgency led by al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters since President Pervez Musharraf joined the US-led “war on terror” in 2001, but the violence has soared since the start of 2007.
Around 600 people have died since the start of this year in suicide attacks, roadside bombings and clashes, mainly along the Afghan border in troubled northwestern Pakistan but also in major cities.
Many of the attacks have targeted the armed forces, police and security forces.
The army’s top medical officer, Lieutenant General Mushtaq Baig, was killed in a suicide attack in the garrison city of Rawalpindi on February 25.