Pakistan bombings kill at least 13

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan —  Bomb blasts tore through a busy market and a pair of police checkpoints in the volatile area near the Afghan border Thursday, killing at least 13 people and raising the specter that militants retaliating for an army offensive will unleash a campaign of violence against Pakistan’s cities.

Assailants detonated bombs on two motorcycles outside Peshawar’s Qissa Khawani market in the early evening as shoppers milled about the area’s warren of shops, Pakistani police said. At least six people were killed and more than 50 injured.

Later, police said, they found the four assailants hiding in a nearby hotel. Two of the attackers were killed in a gunfight and the other two were arrested, according to Pakistani television reports.

Peshawar was hit by a second attack later in the evening. A suicide bombing killed four police officers at a checkpoint on the city’s outskirts.

About 150 miles south of Peshawar, in Dera Ismail Khan, an attacker rammed another police checkpoint, killing an officer and two civilians.

The attacks came a day after an assault on a cluster of security buildings that killed 27 people in Lahore, on the opposite side of the country.

The urban violence suggested a shift in strategy by militants as Pakistani troops wage a military offensive against Taliban fighters in the Swat Valley and surrounding districts. Analysts and Pakistani officials have said the attacks are retaliatory strikes directed at urban areas and meant to weaken the resolve of Pakistanis to oust militants from the country’s northwest.

A militant group calling itself Tehrik-i-Taliban Punjab claimed responsibility for the Lahore attack, telling the Associated Press that it was retaliation for Pakistan’s monthlong offensive in the Swat Valley.

The attack leveled a police emergency services building and destroyed part of a building housing a provincial office of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s spy agency. Gunmen leaped out of a van and fired at police guarding the buildings before detonating the explosives-laden van. At least 15 of the dead were police officers.

Pakistani troops have retaken from the Taliban large sections of Swat, officials say, including 70% of the district’s largest city, Mingora. The military also has said it has killed more than 1,100 militants, though that cannot be independently verified.

“They want to demoralize the people of Pakistan,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said. “But the people of Pakistan have stood very firmly against the militants. This operation is going successfully. . . . We have taken most of their places, and that has frustrated the plans of these militants.”

The blasts in Peshawar were the city’s second and third bomb attacks in a week. Last week, a car bomb at a cinema killed six people and injured 75.

ajrodriguez@tribune.com