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2 blasts rock Pakistan
11/03/2008 09:09 - (SA)
Lahore - Bombs hit a federal police headquarters and a house in the eastern city of Lahore on Tuesday, killing at least 15 people and wounding many more, police said.
Mirza Mohammed Yasin, an FIA official in the capital, Islamabad, said the police building was devastated by a bomb planted inside near an elevator. At least a dozen people died, said Mohammed Afzal, a Lahore police official.
Three more died in a second bombing at a house in an upscale residential area, Afzal said. It was not immediately clear who lived there.
Private TV footage showed the badly damaged facade of the seven-story police building, with piles of bricks scattered across an intersection. Flames shot up from part of debris.
Glass from storefront windows and car windshields littered the street, where firefighters sprayed hoses over charred wreckage of mangled cars, one of them crushed by a downed tree.
Paramedics carried a bloodied body on a stretcher from the building, whose facade was partly blown off, while volunteers sifted through the rubble with bare hands, apparently searching for survivors.
A motorbike rider carried away one wounded man, covered in blood and looking dazed, while others with minor injuries stumbled out of the area.
Dawn News television quoted police officer Asmal Gondal as saying that two suicide bombers drove a pickup truck up to the house and detonated their explosives. Two children of a gardener who worked there were killed, the report said. The details of that attack could not immediately be confirmed.
The blasts come amid a spate of violence blamed on Islamic militants, increasingly mounting attacks outside their strongholds along the Afghan border.
- AP
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