Peshawar, Pakistan, Friday 23 October 2009: A car bomb exploded outside a restaurant in Pakistan’s main northwestern city of Peshawar on Friday, wounding up to 10 people, a police official said. Some people may have been killed.

The explosion in the upmarket district Hayatabad came just hours after a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a major air force base in the town of Kamra, on the main road between Peshawar and Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.

“It is a car bomb. There are 10 people wounded and the blast took place in a parking area of a restaurant in Hayatabad,” police official Fazal-e-Amin said at the scene of attack.

Police said a vehicle outside the Evergreen complex, which is used as a wedding hall, restaurant and swimming pool, was completely destroyed.

“Preliminary reports say it was a car bomb blast. It was a severe blast but people were not there at the time so there are not so many casualties,” police official Anwar Shah said.

Aftab Durrani, the head of the Hayatabad Medical Complex, confirmed that 10 wounded people were admitted after the blast.

Peshawar runs into Pakistan’s lawless tribal badlands, an area infested with Al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents that the US has branded the most dangerous place in the world and the site of six militant attacks in four months.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but a deluge of attacks blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked extremists has left more than 190 people dead this month in the frontline state in the US-led war on global extremism.

Pakistan has vowed to crush the network, unleashing a major ground and air offensive targeting TTP in their South Waziristan stronghold along the Afghan border, where al-Qaida is accused of plotting attacks on the West.
(Agency)