Taliban car bomb targets US convoy

The Taliban bombed a US consulate convoy in Peshawar yesterday, killing one person and wounding 11 others in the first attack on Americans in Pakistan since Osama bin Laden’s death.

A US embassy spokesman said two US government employees were lightly wounded in the rush-hour attack in the volatile northwestern city, which runs into the tribal belt that Washington has branded a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.

One of two armoured vehicles was damaged by what a bomb disposal official said was 50 kilograms of low-grade explosives packed into a car and detonated by remote control, dismissing initial reports of a motorcycle suicide bomber.

“Two vehicles of the US consulate were on their way to the consulate when they were attacked,” US embassy spokesman Alberto Rodriguez said.

“One vehicle was damaged. There is no death among our personnel,” he said, adding that two US government employees suffered “minor injuries”.

Witnesses said the armoured vehicle skidded off the road after the blast and smashed into an electricity pylon on a footpath.

City police chief Liaquat Ali said a local man riding a motorbike was killed and 11 others wounded, including two foreigners who received “minor injuries.”

“It was a car bomb. The car was already parked there on the road. It was exploded with a remote control,” he said.

The bomb gouged a foot-deep crater out of the roadside, cracked the front wall of a nearby house and shattered the windows in two others, said an AFP reporter on the scene.

Hukam Khan, in charge of the bomb disposal squad in Peshawar,: “They were not good quality explosives, that’s why there was relatively little damage.”

The Pakistani Taliban swiftly claimed responsibility, threatening further attacks against Western targets in telephone calls to AFP and indicating that the blast was to avenge the May 2 killing of bin Laden by US Navy SEALs.

“Our first enemy is Pakistan, then the United States and after that, other Nato countries,” said spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan.

The US leads a Nato force of around 130,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan that is trying to put down a 10-year Taliban insurgency. Pakistani logistical and military support is considered vital to the war effort.

“Osama was our leader and America is the biggest terrorist,” the spokesman said, adding: “We will inflict such losses that Americans would never forget.”

Yesterday’s attack came exactly a week after the Taliban claimed a devastating bombing that killed 98 people outside a police training centre in the northwest as the first revenge for the Al-Qaeda supremo’s death.

Hours after yesterday’s bombing, a US drone strike destroyed a vehicle in Pakistan’s Taliban-infested North Waziristan district on the Afghan border, killing four suspected militants, local officials said.

The drone strike was the seventh to be reported in Pakistan’s tribal areas near the Afghan border since the operation that killed bin Laden.

The two missiles struck the Tappi area, 10 kilometres east of Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan, where US officials want Pakistan to launch an offensive against networks fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Pakistani opposition leader and former cricketer Imran Khan said Friday his party would block the port in the southern city of Karachi, a key part of the supply chain for Nato forces in Afghanistan, on Saturday to protest against US drone strikes.

A senior official of the Punjab provincial government also said it had decided in principle to cancel four multi-million-dollar aid agreements with the US in protest against the drone strikes.

US officials have been locked in talks this week with Pakistan’s leadership, stepping up efforts to smooth over a crisis sparked by the American raid against bin Laden in the garrison city of Abbottabad.

US officials accuse Pakistani elements of sheltering militants active in Afghanistan and are poring over intelligence from bin Laden’s house, but say so far there is no evidence that the country was complicit in hiding him.

Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders were left angry and embarrassed by the US raid and the discovery that bin Laden had been living, possibly for years, in a military academy town two hours’ drive from Islamabad.

It rocked the country’s seemingly powerful security establishment, with its intelligence services and military widely accused of incompetence or complicity over bin Laden’s presence.