Police hunt suicide bomber inside Pakistani court: officials

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN: Police in Pakistan’s northwest are hunting a suicide bomber believed to be on the loose in a court complex, officials said Tuesday, after at least three people were killed and 19 wounded in an attack.
A second bomber was killed by security forces and a third detonated outside the main gates of the facility, located in the Tangi area of Charsadda district.
“The search for the third bomber is still on,” Suhail Khalid, district police chief, told AFP, adding that a lawyer was among the dead.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack, telling AFP it was “ongoing.”
“I am on the spot, the dead body of one bomber is laying outside the main gate of the court complex, the dead body of the second bomber is inside the complex,” Charsadda district mayor Bahadur Yar told state television.
“The third attacker managed to enter inside. Police are after him,” he added.
Charsadda senior police official Mohammed Ijaz Khan confirmed three bombers had tried to enter the complex, with one dying after detonating his vest and the other killed by police.
It was not immediately clear how many people were inside, but hundreds of people including lawyers, judges and citizens normally attend such district court complexes every day.
Security forces had been on high alert in Pakistan after a wave of attacks killed more than 100 people last week and sparked fears of a militant resurgence.
JuA said they were responsible for several of last week’s attacks including a powerful blast in the eastern city of Lahore which killed 14 people and wounded dozens.
The group, part of the umbrella Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or Pakistani Taliban) vowed earlier this month to launch a fresh offensive on targets in Pakistan including the judiciary.
But the Daesh group claimed the deadliest of last week’s assaults, a suicide bomb at a Sufi shrine in Sindh province on Thursday which killed 90 people and wounded hundreds.
The emergence of IS and a TTP resurgence would be a major blow to Pakistan, which had enjoyed a dramatic improvement in security over the past two years after a military-led crackdown begun in 2014.
Lawyers and the judiciary are frequent targets in Pakistan. Among last week’s assaults was a bomb blast targeting a van carrying judges in Peshawar, which killed their driver.
Last August, JuA along with the Daesh group claimed a suicide bombing in Quetta that killed 73 people, including many of southwestern city’s legal community.