Bomber kills 14 in Pakistan courtroom

Quetta - A suicide bomber killed 14 people — including a judge — after blowing himself up inside a courtroom in a southwestern Pakistani province that has seen intense civil conflict for years, police said.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack at the District Courts complex in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province. At least 25 people were injured, some of whom were in critical condition, said city police chief Rauf Khan.

A senior intelligence official in Quetta — who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media — said the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber.

The blast killed 15 people, including the bomber, a judge, five lawyers and relatives of some of the defendants, Khan said.

Afaq Zahid, an area police chief, said they had transported the dead and injured to a hospital.

Information was not immediately available about who was on trial. The blast shattered windows and destroyed furniture inside the courtroom. Shoes, strips of clothing and body parts littered the scene.

Pakistan's Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao quickly condemned the blast, calling it "an act of terrorism."

Shortly after the attack, lawyers and relatives of the dead and injured gathered outside the District Court complex and chanted anti-government slogans.

Hundreds of relatives thronged a main government hospital where the dead and injured were taken, according to witnesses, who said police were trying to control the crowd.

Government forces have clashed with ethnic Baluch rebels in the vast desert province, scene of long-running unrest over political rights and royalties from rich natural gas fields.

Authorities in recent months have also arrested hundreds of suspected Taliban from Quetta and elsewhere as part of a campaign aimed at deporting Afghans living here without valid travel documents.

The conflict in the sparsely populated and impoverished region has drawn little attention from Western nations more concerned about Taliban militants believed to launch attacks from border regions of Baluchistan into Afghanistan, where NATO forces operate.

Humanitarian concerns emerged in the spring amid reports that tens of thousands of Baluch people had fled their homes in the volatile districts of Dera Bugti and Kohlu.

In August, a UNICEF survey counted 84,000 displaced and recommended to the provincial government that they needed help.

The latest attack came a day after police announced that they had arrested five suspected militants from the southern city of Karachi and Rawalpindi, a garrison city near Islamabad, and that the suspects were planning suicide attacks on foreigners and minority Shiite Muslims.-- Associated Press

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