Attackers hit a busy market and a police checkpoint in northern Pakistan Thursday, killing at least 11 people, critically wounding scores of others and triggering a gun battle between security forces and suspected militants. The latest violence in Peshawar, the largest city near the lawless tribal region near the Afghan border, will further test the central government's resolve to take on militants whose grip on parts of the country has strengthened this year. Bombs mounted on motorcycles tore off walls and shattered windows of a row of small shops in Peshawar's Qissa Khawani Bazaar. Television networks showed video of people carrying a bloody body from a shop between mangled and smoking cars. Senior police officer Zarman Shah Khan said at least six people were killed. A doctor at a nearby hospital, Sahib Gul, said 80 people wounded in the blast had been brought in, many with critical injuries. “It was a sudden blast and then there was fire all around, a cloud of smoke filled the sky,” said Khair Uddin, a shopkeeper whose hands and chest were bloodied by shrapnel from the blast. Commando units rushed to the scene and engaged in a gunfight with suspected militants who holed up in a building near the market, local police chief Malik Naveed told reporters. Two gunmen were shot dead and at least one other was arrested. As the gunfight was under way, a suspected suicide bomber blew up a police checkpoint on the outskirts of the city, killing four police, said police officer Yaseen Khan. The explosions came a day after a suicide attack on police and intelligence agency offices in Lahore that killed about 30 people and wounded more than 300 others. Hakimullah Mehsud, a deputy to Pakistani Taleban chief Baitullah Mehsud, told The Associated Press in a telephone call that Wednesday's attack in Lahore was in response to the military's ongoing offensive against militants in the northeastern Swat Valley. He warned of further attacks in the major cities of Multan, Rawalpindi, Lahore and the capital, Islamabad, and urged civilians to flee. “Our targets are security forces who are killing innocent people in Swat and other adjoining areas,” Mehsud said. “We regret that some innocent people were also killed in the Lahore attack, we did not want that.” In the Lahore attack, gunmen fired and lobbed grenades at offices of the police and top intelligence agency, then detonated an explosive-laden van in a busy street. A little-known group calling itself the Taleban Movement in Punjab has also claimed responsibility for the attack.
