Female suicide bomber hits Pakistan, 6 dead

A female suicide attacker and a handcart bomb targeted Pakistani police on Thursday. Six people died in the first deadly attacks to hit the northwest during Ramadan, officials said.

The city of Peshawar, where the unrest took place, is on the frontline of a Taliban insurgency and borders Pakistan's lawless tribal belt that Washington calls the global headquarters of Al Qaeda.

It was only the third time police have confirmed a woman suicide attacker in the nuclear-armed country of 167 million where Taliban and Al Qaeda linked bombers have killed 4,500 people since 2007, destabilising the government.

Dozens were wounded in Thursday's attacks, carried out several hours apart in the Lahori Gate area of Peshawar, a teeming city of 2.5 million, targeting first a police van and secondly a police checkpost.

"This was a female suicide bomber aged around 17 or 18 who threw a hand grenade on the police checkpost, 20 metres away from the site of the first blast, and then blew herself up," police official Shafqat Malik told AFP.

"Her vest did not explode completely. She was killed and another woman was also killed and three policemen were injured," Malik said.

He said 16 people were admitted with injuries after the second blast, including a 10-year-old boy.

Police official Imtiaz Shah confirmed that the other woman was a passer by and had no connection to the woman, believed to have been around 17 years old.

Police said four officers and a child were killed earlier when a bomb hidden in a handcart on the roadside, tore through a passing police van carrying 20 personnel at 7:10 am.

18 other people were wounded, said police official Muhammad Faisal.

Shattered glass, human flesh, blood and police uniforms littered the area after the bomb went of.

Taliban and other Islamist extremists have carried out a terrifying bombing campaign across Pakistan since government forces targeted extremists holed up in an Islamabad mosque in July 2007.

Militants bitterly oppose Islamabad's US alliance in the war against the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan and US drone strikes on Pakistani soil, which leaked American diplomatic cables showed the government quietly approved.

On Wednesday, a US drone strike in the North Waziristan tribal district killed up to 21 Afghan fighters from the Al Qaeda linked Haqqani network, considered the top US foe across the border in eastern Afghanistan.

US officials have accused Pakistani intelligence of playing a double game with extremists, including the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, in order to exert influence in Afghanistan and offset the might of arch-rival India.

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