The provincial government confirmed casualties at 15 dead. Rescue operation, he said, had been launched to retrieve bodies from the debris of the buildings. The bomber, he said, rammed the explosives-laden vehicle into a playground where a volleyball game was underway.
After the blast, some of the buildings caught fire. Fire fighters were making efforts to extinguish the fire. The district administration announced emergency in hospitals of the district. Lakki Hospital reportedly received eight bodies and 35 injured.
Eyewitnesses said the bomber wreaked carnage at a traditional shooting volleyball game in the village Shah Hassan Khel, a stronghold of the militants. The casualty figures are expected to rise as the area is thickly populated, said an official of district police.
He said: "We are trying to get the actual death figures, but no mobile phone or other facility is available in the area and we are waiting for police officials to return from the area, which is 25 km away from the main Lakki-Marwat City."
REUTERS ADDS: A suicide bomber blew himself up in an SUV at a volleyball game in north-west Pakistan on Friday, killing 75 people in a village that opposes al Qaeda-linked Taliban insurgents, police said. The bomber struck as young men played volleyball in front of a crowd of spectators, including elderly residents and children, near the town of Lakki Marwat, officials said.
The bloodshed will put President Asif Ali Zardari's efforts to fight the Taliban under greater scrutiny, pressure he does not need at a time when corruption cases against his allies could be revived. "It's just a disaster. I can see flesh, bodies and wounded all around," Fazl-e-Akbar, a witness, told Reuters by telephone.
"It's dark. Vehicles' headlights are being used to search for victims." Local police chief Ayub Khan said the bomber blew himself up in his sport utility vehicle in the middle of the field. A second vehicle was believed to have fled the scene.
"We have removed all bodies and wounded from the rubble and now the total death toll is 75, while 42 wounded were wounded," he told Reuters by telephone. It was one of the bloodiest bombings in US ally Pakistan since the October 2007 attack that killed at least 139 people when former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Zardari's wife, returned home from self-imposed exile.
An attack on a sporting event is highly unusual, but could be part of the militants' strategy of bombing crowded areas such as markets to inflict mass casualties and spread fear and chaos. Police said the village had formed an armed anti-Taliban militia, a phenomenon that started in Pakistan last year.
Despite major military offensives against their strongholds, the Taliban have killed hundreds of people in bombings. Britain's Foreign Office described the attack as horrific and said it underlined the urgent need to fight extremism.
"It is a threat that the international community must help Pakistan to tackle, in the interests both of Pakistan's people and of wider stability," it said in a statement. In a sign of growing security fears, the United Nations will withdraw some of its staff from Pakistan because of safety concerns, a UN spokeswoman said on Thursday.
"We have got to be on the offensive and launch precise strikes on (militant) training centres and hideouts. They're losing the battle. Nobody in our society supports them," North West Frontier Province's information minister, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, told Reuters. Violence has intensified since July 2007 when the army cleared militants from a radical mosque in Islamabad.