ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A suicide attack blast near a paramilitary force vehicle wounded several peopled and killed the attacker in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Tuesday, police officials said, while a separate “martyr” was also killed, a high-ranking police official said.
Tehreek-e-Jihad Pakistan, a newly founded jihadist group, claimed responsibility for the attack.
“One martyr, seven injured but all stable,” the high ranking official said, on condition of anonymity.
Medical director of the Hayatabad Medical Complex, professor Shehzad Akbar Khan, confirmed that the hospital received two people who were wounded by the explosion and that both were in stable condition. He said the remaining injured were taken to another hospital, CMH.
The explosion was a suicide attack that hit a vehicle of the paramilitary Frontier Corps in Peshawar, police said.
Pakistan’s army said on Friday it was seriously concerned that militants had found safe havens in neighbouring Afghanistan and threatened to take an “effective response” two days after 12 of its soldiers died in two attacks.
Last week, the same jihadist group attacked a military base in the southwest province of Balochistan.
Islamist militants, who aim to overthrow the Pakistani government and install their own brand of strict Islamic law in the predominantly Muslim country of 220 million people, have also been active in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
They have stepped up attacks since revoking a ceasefire agreement with the government in late 2022, including the bombing of a mosque in the northwestern city of Peshawar that killed more than 100 people earlier this year.
(Reporting by Asif Shahzad; Writing by Shivam Patel; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Bernadette Baum)
