Pakistan bomb blast kills at least 14 near polio centre

Eight of the victims are reportedly in critical conditions.

“The blast was apparently carried out by a bomber”, Balochistan Home Minister Mir Sarfaraz Bugti said.

“There are 15 dead, including 12 police, one paramilitary, and two civilians”, a local police official, requesting anonymity, said on Wednesday.

Officials said 25 others were wounded, some critically, in the explosion in Quetta, the capital of restive Baluchistan province.

The bombing, which hit a police patrol close to the center, made the security forces the primary target, said police chief Shah, speaking at the scene of the bombing as rescuers rushed the wounded to hospital. About 20 people were injured.

The campaign was postponed after the bombing, the provincial Health Ministry said.

“Then I heard people screaming and sirens of ambulances”, he told the AFP news agency. However, Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Qazi Khalilullah denied it, saying “All Pakistanis working at the Pakistan consulate in Jalalabad are safe.,.no one has been injured”, he said. “There would have been several civilian casualties, had the bomber managed to enter the main building”, DIG Shah said. Such attacks on security forces are not rare in the region.

The blast came on third day of Balochistan-wide polio vaccination campaign.

The campaign faced threats against polio vaccination teams issued by armed religious groups such as the Pakistan Taliban (TTP) and its allies in the past.

The dead were identified as Faheem Ahmad, Khan Muhammad, Abdul Qadir, Faizullah, Jumma Khan, Abdul Khaliq, Rasool Bakhsh, Muhammad Asif, Hazoor Bakhash, Ali Gul, Ali Ahmed and Tauseef.

People transfer an injured policeman to a hospital in southwest Pakistan’s Quetta, Jan. 13, 2016. About 70 per cent of the children who were diagnosed positive for polio in 2014 had not received the oral polio vaccine due to a ban on vaccination imposed by the Taliban.

“We are living in a war zone and I can’t say anything about the nature of the blast”, he added.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where the disease is still endemic. Militant assaults have poorly struck efforts to eliminate it on immunisation groups which have stated nearly 80 lives.