At least 30 people were killed on Thursday when a car bomber, apparently targeting a vehicle carrying Chinese workers involved in mining activities, rammed into a police van escorting them in Hub.
The Chinese were unhurt but all seven policemen in the van and 23 bystanders were killed. Twenty-eight people were wounded. Another seven people, including policemen, were killed by a car bomb in Hangu on Thursday. The third attack killed at least 15, including two children, at an army training centre at a military cantonment area of Kohat, according to officer Mohammad the police control room in the North West Frontier Province town.
"The explosion occurred as people were about to offer evening prayers, it was apparently a suicide bombing," he said. The attack in Hub, at the border of Balochistan and Sindh provinces, was the biggest of the latest wave of violence and the first in Balochistan.
"I saw flames all around me after a big bang. It appeared as if cars were flying in the air," Mohammad Raheem, 17, a labourer injured in the blast, told Reuters in a Karachi hospital. "There were cries and screams all around. After that I don't know what happened. I just fainted."
Chinese workers have been targeted in the same region by separatists in the past, but police suspect the latest attack was more to do with the storming of the Lal Masjid. "We believe it is part of the recent attacks carried out by militants," Tariq Masood Khosa, police chief of Balochistan, told Reuters.
A cleric in the southern city voiced fears of civil war if Musharraf stepped up his fight on militants in the NWFP. "Musharraf has chosen a dangerous path," said Mufti Muhammad Naeem of Karachi's largest Islamic school. "I think this situation could blow up in an all-out civil war."
The car bomber who blew himself up at a police training centre in the Hangu timed his attack to coincide with the arrival of a group of young recruits. "The attacker tried to crash through the gate. He blew himself up as security guards at the gate tried to stop him," said Fakhr-e-Alam, top administration official of the city.
Hangu, which itself has a history of sectarian violence, is close to the lawless tribal regions on the Afghan border, known to be hotbeds of support for al Qaeda and Taliban militants. At the same time as militants are believed to be avenging the mosque assault, pro-Taliban fighters have abandoned a peace pact in North Waziristan, raising fears of resurgence in violence in NWFP. Authorities on Thursday sent tribal elders to the militants in a bid to save the pact.