Explosion kills at least 11 at market

QUETTA, Pakistan -- Assailants set off a powerful time bomb next to an army truck parked in a teeming outdoor market in southwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing at least 11 people -- mostly civilians -- and injuring more than two dozen others, police and hospital officials said.

The bomb, which was hidden on a bicycle, blew out windows, shredded the truck's canvas cover and left bloodstained debris over a wide area of the market in Quetta, the main city in Baluchistan province, said police chief Rehmat Ullah.

The dead included one soldier and 10 vendors and passers-by, senior police official Pervez Bhatti told Pakistan's private Geo television. Several of the 27 injured people were in critical condition, he said.

A little-known group, the Baluchistan National Army, claimed responsibility hours after the blast but said it never wanted to kill civilians. "Our target was the army truck and the soldiers," said the group's spokesman, Mir Azad Baluch, in a telephone call to a journalist in the city.

Baluch said the group was also behind previous such attacks and warned to "continue to target military personnel until federal government abandon plans to set up news garrisons in Baluchistan, and give people of our province their due share from the resources."

Baluchistan has been hit by a series of low-level bombings in recent years, most of which have not caused any casualties and have been blamed on feuding tribesmen.

Baluch's group is opposed to plans to set up new Pakistan Army garrisons in the province and has been trying to pressure authorities to get more returns from gas extracted from their region.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said the blast was perpetrated by people "working against peace and development in the country," and called on security agencies to capture those responsible. Quetta Mayor Rahim Kakar blamed "nationalists who don't want to see progress in Baluchistan."

Television footage showed the bodies of two victims in the road, their faces covered by thick shawls.

At least four vehicles were destroyed by the blast. The injured were frantically loaded into ambulances as investigators inspected the site.

In addition to homegrown militants, there are signs Baluchistan has become a base for Taliban and al-Qaida-linked fighters.

Since July, Pakistani authorities have rounded up dozens of terror suspects around the country, even as it wages a bloody military campaign against al-Qaida along its lawless border with Afghanistan.

On Dec. 1, police and intelligence agents exchanged fire with two suspected Chechen militants hiding in a home on the outskirts of Quetta. One suspect died and the other was arrested. Eleven policemen were injured when the men hurled grenades during the raid.

The city has also been rocked by sectarian violence.

In March, suspected Sunni militants fired at a Shiite procession in Quetta, killing 44 people and wounding 150. And in July 2003, attackers armed with machine guns and grenades stormed a Shiite mosque in the city, killing 50 people praying inside.

The counterterrorism efforts of Musharraf have made him a key ally of the West against religious extremism, but have drawn criticism at home from those uneasy over his ties to Washington.