At least 11 killed as motorcycle bomb driven into protest rally

A LARGE bomb blast has ripped through a protest rally in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, killing at least 11 people and wounding nearly 60 in an attack claimed by a breakaway Taliban faction.

The blast occurred when a man on a motorcycle rammed into the crowd of hundreds of pharmacists, who were protesting over new amendments to a law governing drug sales, local police official Zaheer Abbas said.

Two senior police officers, including a former provincial counterterrorism chief, were among those killed, he added.

Sameer Ahmad, the Lahore deputy commissioner, said at least 11 people were killed and 58 wounded.

A Taliban splinter group called Jamaat-ul-Ahrar claimed the attack in a text message, saying it was revenge for Pakistani military operations against Islamist militants in tribal regions along the Afghan border.

Live TV registered a loud bang and showed smoke and fire billowing up as people ran away, some of them carrying the wounded.

“We just couldn’t understand what happened,” Tufail Nabi told local Geo News TV.

“It was as if some big building collapsed,” he said as he limped away.

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar is one of several splinter groups from the Pakistani Taliban, which has carried out scores of attacks against security forces and religious minorities.

In recent years, Pakistan has launched several offensives against the Taliban and other Islamist militant groups in the tribal regions.

The force of the explosion was such that a nearby television news van was almost entirely destroyed by the blast.

“Apparently it was a suicide blast but police are still investigating to know the exact nature,” a Punjab police spokesman told Reuters.

Among the dead were Zahid Gondal and Ahmad Mobin, both senior figures in the police in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest and most influential province, of which Lahore is the capital. Mobin, a deputy inspector general of police, had been at the scene to urge the protesters to end their demonstration.

Security forces, including large numbers of soldiers, cordoned off the area of the blast.

Officials had been braced for an incident of some kind in the city after the National Counter Terrorism Authority issued a warning on February 7 that “an unidentified terrorist group has planned a terrorist attack in Lahore”.

It was as if some big building collapsed Witness Tufail Nabi