PAKISTAN: Bomb wounds 17 in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar

A bomb wounded 17 people in a bazaar in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's volatile North West Frontier Province on Tuesday (October 9) police officials said. According to security officials, the bomb was planted in a water cooler outside CD and video shops in a busy shopping plaza. Doctors say two of the wounded are in serious condition. Police officials told reporters shops owners had been receiving threatening letters warning them to close down their CD and video shops, and security had been beefed up there recently. About twenty shops in the vicinity were damaged by the blast. Attacks by Islamist militants have become commonplace in Pakistan, especially after the army stormed a mosque in Islamabad in July to crush an armed student movement. Pakistani warplanes on Tuesday pounded militant positions in North Waziristan, as fighting raged for a fourth day in a tribal region known as an al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold, an army spokesman said. There has been intense fighting since Saturday (October 6) night around the town of Mir Ali, and nearly 200 people had been killed before Tuesday's airstrike. There have been growing fears in the West that al Qaeda had regrouped in Waziristan and was organising conspiracies in Western countries from there. The militants had originally fled to the region after U.S.-led forces drove them out of Afghanistan in late 2001. U.S. ally President Pervez Musharraf swept a vote by parliamentarians on Saturday (October 6), but he will have to wait until Oct. 17 at least to hear whether the Supreme Court rules whether he was eligible to stand for re-election while still army chief. Analysts say opposition among many Pakistanis, mainly in the conservative northwest, to General Musharraf's support for U.S. policy in the region has increased.

ITN Source | October 10, 2007

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