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PESHAWAR, Pakistan: A suicide car bomber tore through a police building in Pakistan on Friday, killing 11 people and exacerbating public anger over security breaches behind a wave of recent attacks.
Cash-strapped Pakistan, a nuclear power with a weak government presiding over 167 million people on the faultline of the US-led war on terror, has been battered by assaults that have left more than 170 people dead in 11 days.
A suicide car bomber unleashed further chaos Friday by blowing up a vehicle near a police investigations office in a garrison area of Pakistan's northwest city Peshawar, bringing down one side of the building, police said.
"I have counted 11 dead bodies and 13 wounded in the emergency unit. All the dead are civilians. Two are women. Among the injured, there is a four-year-old," said police official Mohammad Gul at the main hospital.
Ambulances screeched through the streets, sirens blaring as rescue teams rushed to ferry out the casualties. TV footage showed smouldering wreckage and a damaged brick wall.
"It was a suicide car bomb," said bomb disposal official Shafqat Malik.
The bomber targeted the police-run Central Investigation Agency (CIA) building in the military garrison area of Peshawar - northwest Pakistan's largest city, on the fringes of the lawless tribal belt on the Afghan border.
Critics rounded on the civilian authorities for being unable to act on intelligence to prevent militants - some in their teens - from blasting their way into police offices on Thursday and trading fire for up to three hours.
At least 40 people died in a string of assaults on security buildings in Lahore, striking at the heart of the country's political heartland, and bombings in the northwest.
Residents in Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan with a secular elite, asked how militants could have penetrated so far and so easily from their sanctuaries in the deeply conservative tribal belt on the Afghan border.
At least 10 attackers blasted their way into the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) branch in Lahore, a police academy in the suburb of Manawan and an elite commando school on the outskirts within minutes of each other.
Militants had already carried out bloody attacks on the Manawan academy in March this year and on the FIA building in March 2008.
"The second attack on Manawan was a major security lapse," a former MP of the district, Khalid Javed Ghukri, told AFP. "People are scared of coming out of their houses."
The press was also scathing over the security lapses that allowed attackers to reportedly climb a wall into the commando school on Thursday and besiege army headquarters in the garrison city Rawalpindi at the weekend.
"In times of war there can be no room for mistakes, especially ones that lead to death and destruction on this scale," wrote The News newspaper.
"The government must assess why authorities have repeatedly failed to pre-empt the strikes despite the existence of intelligence and why terrorists from the northwest have faced few problems in moving into fortified cities."
Interior Minister Rehman Malik conceded that government security forces were not adequately prepared.
"We are improving our capacities. It is true that our forces were not properly equipped for such situation. We have cut our development budget and diverted funds towards enhancing our capacity," he told reporters Thursday.
Police said dozens of people had been picked up in overnight raids in slum areas of Lahore and neighbourhoods populated by Afghans.
Although there was no formal claim of responsibility, suspicion has fallen on Pakistan's Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) movement and Al-Qaeda, as well as homegrown Islamist groups Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Muhammad.
Officials have blamed militants from South Waziristan in Pakistan's tribal belt where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are believed to have carved out safe havens and where an imminent military offensive is expected.
- AFP/yb
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