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PESHAWAR, Pakistan : At least 20 people including women and children were killed and more than 50 wounded in a car bomb attack targeting a police headquarters in Pakistan's northwestern city of Kohat on Tuesday.
Militants have launched a series of attacks in the past week as Muslims mark the final days of the holy fasting month of Ramadan.
Six policemen were among the dead in the latest attack and police said the other victims were women and children who were breaking their fast in the garrison city, close to the lawless tribal areas of Khyber and Orakzai.
"It was a car bomb blast. We are investigating whether the car was parked or was exploded by a suicide bomber," Khalid Khan, a top administrative official in Kohat, told AFP. "Six children, four women and six policemen died."
The toll was confirmed by a senior police official in Kohat, Dilawar Bangash, who said that 54 people were wounded.
A police residential complex was severely damaged and houses nearby had also collapsed, trapping people in the rubble.
Rescue workers were facing difficulties as electricity was suspended after the blast.
There was no claim of responsibility, but the Pakistani Taliban has been blamed for similar bombings.
The Taliban said earlier Tuesday they would continue to target security forces after they claimed responsibility for a Monday attack in Lakki Marwat, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, that killed 19 people including nine policemen.
"We are targeting Pakistani security forces because the government has allowed America to launch drone attacks on us," Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman Azam Tariq told AFP by telephone.
"Rather it is on the Pakistan government's behest that drone attacks target us," he said. "We will continue suicide attacks on security forces. Civilians should avoid proximity from them."
On Friday, the group vowed to carry out further attacks inside Pakistan and against the United States and Europe after the US State Department added it to a blacklist of foreign terrorist organisations.
The series of attacks come even as Pakistan 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 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 3,700 people have been killed in the last three years in a series of suicide attacks and bomb explosions, many of them carried out by the Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist extremists.
- AFP/al/fa
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