At least 11 die in Pakistan suicide attack

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Suicide attackers shot their way past guards and set off a massive blast Tuesday outside a luxury hotel where foreigners and well-to-do Pakistanis mixed, killing at least 11 people and wounding 70, officials said.

The bombers struck the Pearl Continental Hotel about 10 p.m., when nightlife was still in swing. The attack reduced a section of the hotel to concrete rubble and twisted steel and left a huge crater in a parking lot.

The blast came a week after Taliban leaders warned they would carry out major attacks in large cities in retaliation for an army offensive to reclaim the nearby Swat Valley region from the militants. No claim surfaced immediately for the bombing in Peshawar, the northwest’s largest city with about 2.2 million people.

Earlier in the day, officials said Pakistan’s military engaged militants on two fronts elsewhere in the northwest. The army dispatched helicopter gunships in support of citizens fighting the Taliban in one district and used artillery fire against militants in another after sympathetic tribal elders refused to hand them over.

Neither operation was anywhere near the size of the military’s offensive in the Swat Valley, where 15,000 troops have battled up to 7,000 Taliban fighters.

But the battles Monday and Tuesday in the Upper Dir and Bannu districts suggest that pockets of pro-Taliban sentiment remain strong in some areas, while the militants’ form of hard-line Islam is unpalatable in others — particularly because of the violence the militants have used to enforce it.

Peshawar lies in between the two districts. The Pearl Continental, affectionately called the “PC” by Pakistanis, overlooks a golf course and a historic fort. The ritziest hotel in the city, it is relatively well-guarded and set far back from the main road.