Suicide car bomber kills 14 in northwest Pakistan

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — At least 14 people were killed and 34 wounded when a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into a police post in northwest Pakistan on Monday, police said.

"There were nine policemen among the dead," senior police official Iftikhar Ahmad told AFP by telephone after the attack on Lakki Marwat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, not far from tribal areas that are a stronghold of the Taliban.

Shahid Hameed, a spokesman for the Lakki Marwat police, also confirmed the death toll. Police said 20 policemen were among the injured.

Police said the blast destroyed the police station building and damaged a nearby administrative building.

A doctor in Lakki Marwat's main hospital said eight bodies and 13 wounded had been taken to his hospital, which was also damaged.

"There are six policeman among the dead. The other two bodies are beyond recognition," doctor Abdul Majid Marwat told AFP.

There has been no claim of responsibility for the bombing but the Pakistani Taliban has been blamed for similar attacks.

The group Friday vowed to carry out further attacks inside Pakistan and against the United States and Europe after the US State Department added the group to a blacklist of foreign terrorist organisations.

Militants have launched a series of attacks as Muslims mark the final days of the holy fasting month of Ramadan even as the country struggles to deal with massive flooding that has killed nearly 1,800 people and left millions reliant on aid handouts.

On Friday, a suicide bomber killed at least 59 people at a Shiite Muslim rally in Quetta, capital of the southwest province of Baluchistan.

That attack came just days after three suicide bombers killed 31 people and wounded hundreds more during a Shiite mourning procession in Lahore. The attack was subsequently claimed by the Pakistani Taliban.

Northwest Pakistan suffers from chronic insecurity, largely connected to the semi-autonomous tribal belt near Afghanistan, which Washington calls the most dangerous place on earth and a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.

More than 3,660 people have been killed in a series of suicide attacks and bomb explosions, many of them carried out by the Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist extremists, in Pakistan during the last three years.