The death toll from a devastating car bomb in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar has risen to 12 after a teenage boy died overnight, a police official said yesterday.
The blast ripped through a packed street Saturday, killing men, women and children and leaving severed body parts littering the roads near an ice cream shop and an Internet cafe in the densely populated Kashkal area.
“One of the seriously injured of yesterday’s blast died in the hospital at night,” Peshawar police official Khan Abbas said from a hospital treating the wounded. “So far, we have registered 36 injured in the blast.”
PHOTO: REUTERS
Abbas said that the boy, aged 16 or 17, was the fourth youngster to perish in the explosion.
Two boys aged about 15 or 16 died on Saturday, while an 11-year-old girl who was studying at a nearby school for the disabled also died. Two of the dead were women, he said, and the rest were men.
A bomb disposal official said more that 30kg of explosives was used in the blast, which was detonated by a timer.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack, but swathes of the North West Frontier Province — of which Peshawar is the capital — have been plagued by a violent uprising led by Taliban extremists.
Peshawar is the gateway to Pakistan’s troubled tribal belt on the Afghan border, where the US says Taliban and al-Qaeda extremists have carved out safe havens to plot new attacks on the West.
Desperate families had sought shelter in Peshawar after escaping a military offensive against Taliban militants in three districts further north, where the Pakistani army is determined to drive out encroaching rebel fighters.
The UN refugee agency had said more that 1.1 million people have fled the fighting and registered with authorities in the past two weeks.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS