Peshawar: A suicide bomber in a vehicle killed two people including US citizens and seriously wounded 19 others including Pakistani nationals and policemen in the north-western city Peshawar on Monday morning, police officials said.
The officials said the bomber rammed into another vehicle of US consulate near residential quarters for the foreigners.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which a police officer said took place near a building occupied by a United Nations agency.
The police and rescue forces rushed to the spot and cordoned off the area while injured had been shifted to Khyber Teaching Hospital (KTH).
The hospital sources said that 18 injured were shifted to the KTH. They added that the injured also included 2 children, 2 women and 3 police officials and few foreigners as well.
Umar Riaz, a senior police officer, said initial reports suggested the blast was a car bomb, with the vehicle parked around 25 metres from the office of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
The explosion left a crater in the road and destroyed a Jeep, damaging two others and demolishing the facing walls of four nearby houses, an AFP reporter said.
Provincial information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain while told reporters that the two dead were the US citisens.
Peshawar is the main city in northwest Pakistan and the gateway to the lawless tribal regions along the Afghan border, where Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants have strongholds.
The United States confirmed that a consulate vehicle was attacked in the city of Peshawar in northwest Pakistan on Monday, wounding two American and two Pakistani consulate staff.
Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said no US consulate staff were killed, but said the United States was “seeking further information about other victims of this heinous act”.
“We can confirm that a vehicle belonging to the US consulate in Peshawar was hit in an apparent terrorist attack,” she said in a statement released by the embassy in Islamabad.
She said two US personnel and two Pakistani staff of the consulate were receiving medical treatment after being wounded in the attack.
“We stand ready to work with Pakistani authorities on a full investigation so that the perpetrators can be brought to justice,” she added.
The United States is currently weighing up whether to blacklist as terrorists the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, whose leaders are understood to be based in Pakistan, in a move that could set back already fraught ties with Islamabad.
Anti-American sentiment has increased since Islamabad agreed in July to end a seven-month blockade on NATO goods crossing into Afghanistan. The blockade was imposed after botched US air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November.
The United States leads around 130,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan but is preparing to hand over security responsibility to Afghans by the end of 2014.
In May 2011, a Taliban bomb damaged a US consulate vehicle and wounded two US government employees in Peshawar just days after American commandos killed bin Laden in a raid on his Pakistan hideout.
In February 2010, three American military personnel were killed and two wounded in a bomb attack at the inauguration of a renovated girls’ school in the northwestern district of Lower Dir.
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