Islamabad - At least 40 people were killed Sunday by a suicide bomber at a meeting of tribal leaders in north-west Pakistan who vowed to fight Islamic militants, local media reports and officials said. The bomber blew himself up among a crowd of 1,000 people at the end of a grand jirga in Darra Adam Khel in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), near the country's lawless tribal areas, where Taliban and al-Qaeda militants are based.
DawnNews TV reported that 37 people were killed and 35 injured, while Geo TV and other local news channels reported the death toll was at least 40.
The jirga was being held among five tribes to sign an agreement to clean armed Islamic militants out their areas, a senior military official said.
Emergency medical teams rushed the injured to hospitals in Darra Adam Khel, and the seriously wounded were taken to bigger hospitals in the provincial capital Peshawar, reports said.
It was the third suicide bombing in the volatile north-west region in three days. On Friday, 42 people were killed when a bomber blew himself up at a funeral of a policeman in Mangora. Two people were killed and 20 injured Saturday in a suicide car bombing on a security convoy in the Bajaur tribal district.
In late January, Darra Adam Khel was the site of intense fighting between the Pakistani military and pro-Taliban militants who had seized a road tunnel and later four trucks carrying ammunition. Twenty-four militants and 13 soldiers were killed in the clashes.
Pakistan's tribal areas are safe havens for armed Islamic groups, as well as al-Qaeda militants and Taliban fighters who have launched cross-border attacks on international forces into Afghanistan. However, the militants have turned inward and launch regular attacks against Pakistani security forces and political figures.
Pakistan has suffered more than five dozen suicide attacks alone the past 14 months that have killed more than 1,000 people in a campaign that escalated after army commandos stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007 to end a siege by armed militants. Hundreds of people were believed to have died in that attack.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a key US ally in fighting Taliban and al-Qaeda, has sought to reach agreements with elders in the NWFP and tribal areas to peel them away from Islamic militants.
Other elders such as Baitullah Mehsud, leader of Pakistani Taliban umbrella organization in the tribal South Waziristan, face military action, but that has prompted retaliation against Islamabad.
On Saturday an anti-terrorism court in the garrison city of Rawalpindi declared Mehsud an official suspect in the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto last December 27 and issued warrants for the arrest of him and four co-horts, the Associated Press of Pakistan reported.
Shortly after Bhutto's death in a gun and suicide bombing attack, Musharraf claimed Mehsud had ordered the hit and also trained hundreds of suicide bombers who were attacking security forces across the country.
Mehsud has denied involvement in the death of Bhutto, a vocal critic of Islamic militancy in Pakistan, and remains in hiding in South Waziristan, though he still has direct command of armed forces there.
