Suicide blast kills Pakistan election candidate

February 11th, 2008 Sana · No Comments

Source: AFP

ISLAMABAD (AFP) — A suicide car bomber killed an election candidate and nine other people in northwest Pakistan on Monday, fuelling fears about the increasingly bloody campaign for key national polls in a week’s time.

The blast highlighted the dangers of campaigning in the troubled Islamic republic, with candidates keeping a low profile since the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto at an election rally in December.

Police said Monday’s attack in the tribal region of North Waziristan, bordering Afghanistan, targeted the convoy of a candidate named as Nisar Ali as he travelled to a political meeting.

“It was a suicide attack, a miscreant rammed his car laden with explosives into the candidate’s convoy,” a tribal police official told AFP after the attack in the village of Aidak, near the major town of Mir Ali.

“Ten people were killed, including the candidate and an administration official, while 13 others were wounded.”

It was not clear which party the candidate was linked to. Candidates must, by law, stand as independents in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal zones but are often affiliated to political groupings.

The bombing is the latest in a wave of suicide attacks across nuclear-armed Pakistan that has so far this year left nearly 100 people dead, all blamed by the government on Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.

A suicide bombing at an election rally held by a small nationalist opposition party in the northwestern town of Charsadda on Saturday killed at least 25 people.

The killing of ex-premier Bhutto has also been blamed on an Al-Qaeda-linked militant commander based in the tribal region of South Waziristan, which borders the area where Monday’s suicide attack took place.

The spiralling violence caused US Defence Secretary Robert Gates to warn a day earlier that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda pose a direct threat to the Islamabad government.

In a further illustration of the challenge facing Pakistani authorities, a top Afghan Taliban commander, Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, was captured and wounded Monday by security forces in a southwestern village, police and the army said.

Opposition parties have accused the government of playing up security threats to politicians in a bid to dampen campaigning in favour of parties that favour Musharraf, but rallies have gathered pace in recent days.

Lawyers across the country launched a boycott of courts until the elections and held protests inside courtrooms in major cities to call for the restoration of the country’s deposed chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

Musharraf sacked Chaudhry under a state of emergency in November. He remains under house arrest.

Later Monday hundreds of supporters of Musharraf’s key allies, the former ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q) party, arrived in a fleet of buses in the capital and held a rally in front of parliament, witnesses said.

Another former premier, Nawaz Sharif, accused the government of “massive” attempts to rig the polls at a news conference in Lahore.

Meanwhile, two surveys by US-based groups said that the sympathy effect of Bhutto’s death in a suicide and gun attack in the northern city of Rawalpindi had boosted the chances of her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in the election.

Fifty percent of Pakistanis said they would vote for the PPP, against 22 percent for Sharif’s party, said one poll by the International Republican Institute released on Monday. The PML-Q were chosen by only 14 percent.

The survey also found that 75 percent of Pakistanis wanted Musharraf to quit.

A separate poll released at the weekend by the Terror Free Tomorrow organisation found that 36.7 percent of people said they would vote for the PPP, 25.3 percent for Sharif’s grouping and 12 percent for the PML-Q.

The poll further said that sympathy for Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden had dropped sharply, with only 24 percent of Pakistanis approving of him against 46 percent in a similar poll in August.