A car bomb planted by suspected Islamic militants exploded at a filling station in Pakistan’s Punjab province Tuesday, killing at least 25 people and wounding 154 others, officials said.
Many of those hurt were trapped for hours by debris and shrapnel after the blast reduced the station building to rubble, with rescue workers heaving stones and metal away to rescue survivors.
“A total of 25 people were killed and 154 injured, some of them were in a serious condition,” Adnan Khalil, the official in charge of rescue efforts, told AFP.
Most structural damage was to the gas station building, which was flattened in the blast, and a nearby office of national airline Pakistan International Airlines (PIA).
“The rescue work is almost over. Most casualties were recovered from the debris of the PIA building and gas station,” Mr Khalil said.
Police and hospital officials have confirmed 22 dead, while hospital officials said a total of 142 injured people were treated at two hospitals in the city of Faisalabad, Pakistan’s textile capital.
District civil defence officer Chaudry Riaz Ahmed said the blast was caused by a planted bomb.
“A Toyota Corolla carrying about 40 kilogrammes of explosives was parked near the filling station. It exploded around 10.25 a.m.,” he said, adding that more than 50 vehicles were damaged by the blast.
Eyewitness Ijaz Hussain told reporters at the site that he heard and felt a loud blast before chaos ensued.
“It was a deafening blast – I thought the ground had been jolted by an earthquake. Everybody was running here and there to save his life. I saw injured people and dead bodies scattered here and there,” said Mr Hussain.
Television pictures showed the station had been reduced to a pile of bricks and gnarled metal as rescue officials worked to remove rubble from the scene to search for survivors, and ambulance vehicles ferried the injured away.
Senior administration official Zaheer Anwar said that by the evening there was no-one left trapped under rubble.
City commissioner Tahir Husain told private Geo television that rescue officials heaved bricks and metal away with cranes and other machinery.
Mr Hussain told private TV channel Waqt that it was not a suicide attack.
“It was not a suicide attack. It was a planted bomb blast. The bomb exploded near the gas cylinders that triggered a bigger blast,” he said.
Mr Hussain said that the attack may have been aimed at government buildings close to the filling station, which sold compressed natural gas for vehicles, adding that some of the buildings were damaged in the blast.
Pakistan has been wracked by violence in recent years, mostly targeting security officials.
Some 4,000 people have been killed in bomb blasts, suicide and gun attacks blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters since Pakistan troops stormed a militant mosque in Islamabad in July 2007.
On Saturday at least one person was killed and another wounded when a bomb exploded in a house in Pakistan’s biggest city of Karachi.
Faisalabad city is near the home of a Christian government minister who was buried Friday after being killed in a hail of bullets in Islamabad last week over his opposition to the country’s strict Islamic blasphemy laws.
His assassination sparked international outrage and stoked concern about rampant militancy and rising extremism throughout the nuclear-armed nation, a fractious ally in the US-led war in Afghanistan.