Suicide bomber rams police truck, kills seven

A Pakistani Taliban suicide bomber rammed a car into a police truck in the southwestern city of Quetta on Wednesday, killing at least seven people, police said.

The attack killed five police officials and two passers-by on the outskirts of the city of Quetta, police chief Abdur Razzaq Cheema said. He said 22 people were wounded, eight of them critically.

Sarfraz Bugti, the home minister of Baluchistan province, of which Quetta is capital, told Reuters: “It was a suicide blast.”

Quetta is about 100 km (60 miles) east of the border with Afghanistan.

Bugti said the truck carrying the police officials was on its way to the city to drop them at their posts when the suicide bomber rammed into the vehicle. Television pictures showed the burnt wreckage of the vehicles.

The Pakistani Taliban, an umbrella organisation of various militant groups within Pakistan, and loosely allied to the Afghan Taliban, issued a statement claiming responsibility, Reuters reports.