Karachi: Militants armed with guns and a truck bomb destroyed a police department in Pakistan's biggest city of Karachi on Thursday, killing 18 people and wounding around 100 others, officials said.
One government official said a group of militants first opened fire before detonating a bomb, comparing the explosion to a massive attack that killed 60 people at the five-star Marriott hotel in Islamabad in September 2008.
Pakistan's Taliban swiftly claimed responsibility for what was a rare attack on government security forces in Karachi, a teeming city of 16 million in the south of the country far removed from militant strongholds in the northwest.
Karachi is Pakistan's economic capital, home to its stock exchange and the Arabian Sea port where NATO supplies dock to be trucked overland to support the more than 150,000 US-led troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Witnesses and police said the building, which belonged to the police's Crime Investigation Department (CID), collapsed trapping people under the rubble.
An AFP reporter saw dozens of vehicles destroyed and damaged after the attack as rescue workers stretchered casualties into ambulances.
"The building has been completely destroyed. I can see a crater of 15 feet (five metres). Some houses were also badly damaged," senior police official Tariq Razzaq Dharejo told AFP.
The police chief of Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital, said 18 people were killed and that the attackers dismantled the security cordon at the department by opening fire on police.
"There was an exchange of fire between police and militants. Then it was followed by a truck loaded with explosives," Salahuddin Babar Khattak told reporters at the scene.
"We don't know how many people (militants) were there, but the exchange of fire lasted for some time."
The CID building was used to hold militants in custody, he said, but no important suspect was in detention at the time of the attack.
"They hit the building with the car full of explosives," said Zulfiqar Mirza, the interior minister of Sindh.
"It was a huge blast, which created a big crater, a bit like the Islamabad Marriott hotel," he added.
Sharmilla Farooqi, a spokeswoman for the Sindh government, earlier told AFP that 15 people were killed and around 100 wounded.
"There are five policemen among the dead," she said.
"We have reports that there may be some women police among the casualties because there was a women's police station inside the building."
Suicide attacks and bombings blamed on homegrown Taliban and other Islamist extremist networks have killed around 3,800 people across Pakistan, since government troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad three years ago.
The Karachi bombing came less than a week after a suicide bombing on a mosque packed with worshippers killed 68 people in northwest Pakistan.
That attack Friday in the Darra Adem Khel region, was followed hours later by a grenade assault on a second mosque in the same area that killed four people.
The United States wants Pakistan to do more to fight insurgents crossing into Afghanistan and fuelling a nine-year Taliban uprising against foreign forces supporting the government of Hamid Karzai.
Karachi has already suffered its most serious bout of political violence in years, with 85 people killed after a lawmaker was shot dead in August.
Other security developments in Pakistan on Thursday
- KARACHI - A massive explosion ripped through a security compound on a busy commercial street in Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, killing at least 15 people and injuring more than 30, officials said.
- MASTUNG - Gunmen torched two trucks carrying fuel for NATO forces in Afghanistan in southwestern Baluchistan province. No casualties were reported, police said.
- No one claimed responsibility for the attack but Taliban militants have in the past targeted supplies trucked through Pakistan for coalition forces fighting insurgents in landlocked Afghanistan.
- KALAYA - Security forces killed six militants in an exchange of fire in the northwestern region of Orakzai after militants ambushed a military patrol and killed one soldier, government officials in the region said.
- There was no independent verification of the number of casualties. Militants often reject official figures.
- MIRANSHAH - Six missiles fired by three U.S. drone aircraft struck a house in North Waziristan region, killing seven militants and wounding six, Pakistani intelligence officials in the region said. There was no independent verification of the attack.
- North Waziristan is a known sanctuary for al Qaeda and Taliban militants on the Afghan border. The United States wants Pakistan to launch an offensive there against militants involved in insurgency in Afghanistan.
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