Suicide blast kills 26 in northwest Pakistan police centre

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - A suicide bomber killed at least 26 people and wounded 60 more Sunday at a police recruitment centre in northwest Pakistan in the weekend's third major bomb attack, police said.

The attack raised to nearly 70 the death toll from strikes that have rocked Pakistan since Saturday, after Muslim hardliners called for holy war following last week's storming of the pro-Taliban Red Mosque in Islamabad.

"It was a suicide attack," senior police official Sharif Virk told AFP after the blast in the town of Dera Ismail Khan in Pakistan's troubled North West Frontier Province near the Afghan border.

The death toll was expected to rise as about a dozen of the wounded were in critical condition, said local hospital chief Jahan Zeb Khan.

Bloody human remains and scorched parts of the suicide belt were scattered across the hall where recruits had arrived for medical check-ups and other formalities, as wailing relatives crowded the centre, witnesses said.

Police superintendent Rab Nawaz, speaking hours after the attack, told AFP that "the death toll has risen to 26." At least 13 police were among those killed, he said. "The others were recruits and their relatives."

Earlier, in the Swat Valley, located in the same mountainous province, suicide bombers in two explosives-packed cars hit a Pakistan army convoy, killing at least 17 people, including 12 security personnel.

Five civilians also died -- a family of four buried when the two powerful blasts destroyed their house, and a petrol station worker hit by shrapnel -- said Jabbar Khan, mayor of Matta town where the attack took place.

On Saturday a suicide car bomber killed 24 people in a paramilitary convoy in the tribal region of North Waziristan, where local militant leaders on Sunday said they would scrap a 2006 peace accord with the government.

Last week's Red Mosque raid led Al-Qaeda to call for jihad, or holy war, against Pakistan's government, which has sent thousands of troops into remote areas after President Pervez Musharraf vowed to root out extremists.