Islamabad - At least 11 people, including four children, were killed Thursday in two bomb attacks targeting police in Pakistan's capital and the restive North West Frontier Province (NWFP), officials said. Five officers were injured when a suicide car bomber blew himself up inside the police headquarters in Islamabad.
The attacker managed to drive through the security cordon at the main gate and ram his explosives-laden car into a multi-story building used by the anti-terrorist police as a barracks and interrogation centre.
"We have found some body parts that could be of the suspected suicide bomber," Islamabad police chief Asghar Raza Gardezi told reporters at the blast site.
There were only a few officers inside the three-story building as a large contingent of security forces were deployed to the capital for the security of lawmakers receiving a closed-door briefing from the military leadership on the ongoing Islamic militancy in tribal areas along the Afghan border and the NWFP.
The attack came three weeks after a suicide truck bombing hit Islamabad's five-star Marriott Hotel killing more than 53 people, including the Czech ambassador, two US marines and a Danish intelligence officer. More than 250 people were injured.
Separately, a roadside bomb exploded Thursday next to a police van transporting prisoners to the local jail in the Khwaga Oba area Dir district in NWFP.
Four policemen and three prisoners were killed in the explosion, local police officer Ghulam Mohammad said.
A passing vehicle carrying schoolgirls was also hit in the incident, leaving four of the children dead.
Officials at the local hospital said that most of the 15 injured moved there were policemen and children. They feared that death toll might rise as some of the wounded were in critical condition.
Dir is generally a peaceful district but it borders troubled Swat valley where the security forces are currently engaged in fighting against the pro-Taliban militants.
Violence has intensified over the last few months after the insurgents scaled up their attacks, including suicide bombings, on the troops, and the fierce clashes have taken a heavy toll on the local population.
Heavy collateral damage in the military operations carried out in the militancy-plagued north-western regions close to the Afghan border has triggered political dissent with many lawmakers demanding a halt to the offensives.
The new head of the country's premier Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, told legislators in a closed-door briefing that the military had made enormous sacrifices since it joined the fight against terrorism following al-Qaeda's attacks on Untied States in 2001.
"The lawmakers were informed that 1,368 soldiers were martyred (killed) and 3,348 wounded," military sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Meanwhile, 581 fighters of Arab and Central Asian origin, believed to be linked with the al-Qaeda network, were eliminated, 311 injured and 330 arrested in actions across the country, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Pakistani security forces carried out several offensives in tribal areas and some districts of NWFP, and killed 2,224 local Taliban militants, injured 1,089 and arrested 2,414 over the last seven years.
The civilian casualties in dozens of suicide or other attacks by militants as well as air and artillery strikes by Pakistani forces were not included in the data.
