KABOOM! Once more, a religiously crazed imbecile blows himself up; a weekly if not daily occurrence somewhere in the Muslim world.
The religion of “peace” strikes again. TGO
Refer to story below. Source: Associated Press
AFP
A suicide bomber on Thursday assassinated a prominent Pakistani police commander who took a leading role in anti-Taliban operations in the country’s troubled northwest, police said.
Superintendent Kalam Khan was killed when the bomber detonated alongside his car as he drove to work in a suburb of the northwestern city of Peshawar, which has been hit by a new wave of Islamist militant violence.
Khan, 58, had taken part in a number of anti-Taliban operations and survived at least three previous assassination attempts by bombers and gunmen since being posted to Peshawar in 2009, police official Tahir Ayub told AFP.
“The bomber came on foot and detonated explosives strapped to his body near Khan’s jeep,” bomb disposal squad chief Hukum Khan said.
“We have found the bomber’s head,” he added.
Police said Khan’s driver and bodyguard were also wounded in the attack.
“Kalam Khan’s martyrdom is our big loss. But it is a war and soldiers give such sacrifices in the war,” said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
“We will continue our fight. These acts cannot deter us. We have given sacrifices in the past and we are ready to do so in the future,” he told AFP.
He was killed as his driver slowed down to navigate a road under construction in Peshawar’s Pishta Khara neighbourhood en route to work in the suburban town of Badaber, where a suicide attack killed 15 people on Sunday.
It lies close to Bara town, a stronghold of local warlord Mangal Bagh, who is linked to Islamist militants.
Peshawar has a population of 2.5 million people and has long been on the frontline of violence blamed on an insurgency led by Taliban militants opposed to Islamabad’s alliance with the United States.
Islamist militants have killed more than 4,900 people across Pakistan since government troops raided an extremist mosque in Islamabad in July 2007.
Khan also served in Swat, which was effectively in Taliban hands from 2007 until a decisive military offensive in 2009, and had taken part in “several successful operations against militants,” Ayub said.
He survived a suicide attack outside the Swat capital Mingora in 2008 and was a professional officer, known as a “man of action,” Ayub said.
