Source: AFP

At least 10 people were killed and about 50 wounded Monday when a bomb fixed to a motorcycle exploded in Karachi as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf visited the southern city, a minister said.

The blast ripped through a crowd outside a clothes factory in the city of 12 million people, causing further chaos in the run-up to crucial elections delayed by the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto.

Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, flew in to the city minutes before the bomb went off, although officials said he and Musharraf were far away from the blast and there was no suggestion either man was targetted.

“The death toll has risen to 10 and there are about 50 injured people,” Akhtar Zamin, the home minister for southern Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital, told AFP.

“This is the work of people who want to destabilise the country going towards holding of peaceful elections,” Zamin said.

Musharraf and caretaker premier Mohammedmian Soomro condemned the blast and expressed their grief for the loss of life, state media said.

In separate messages, they asked law enforcement agencies to use all resources to hunt down the perpetrators, the Associated Press of Pakistan said.

“The bomb was planted on a motorbike and exploded outside a textile factory in the Landhi district of Karachi,” senior police official Mohammed Javed told AFP.

Seemi Jamali, who runs the main Jinnah hospital’s casualty department, said there were two teenage boys among the dead, while another doctor confirmed that there were 50 people injured.

“I was leaving the factory when I heard a huge explosion and I saw several people lying in pools of blood on the road. There were more than 30 people who were hit by the blast,” eyewitness Rehman Malik told AFP.

“As soon as the bomb went off the electricity pylon caught fire and the lights went out. There were bodies lying all around and I could hear people screaming in the darkness,” he added.

Wounded people covered in blood and with their clothes blown off by the force of the blast were brought to hospitals in ambulances and on the back of pick-up trucks, an AFP reporter said.

Gunfire erupted in the area in the wake of the attack. The district is a stronghold of supporters belonging to a rival splinter group of a political party that supports Musharraf.

Musharraf, who rarely leaves the capital Islamabad because of security concerns, was in the city to meet officials from the provincial caretaker government, officials said.

The president reaffirmed earlier Monday that general elections would be held on February 18 despite instability following the assassination of opposition leader Bhutto in Rawalpindi last month.

The blast on Monday was the first in the teeming metropolis of Karachi since a double suicide attack on a parade to welcome Bhutto home from exile in October. Bhutto survived that attack but 139 people were killed.

 E-mail this article to a friend