Pakistan suicide bombing kills 20

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan —  A suicide truck bombing Thursday brought down a police building and surrounding structures in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, killing at least 20 people in an attack that underscored the militants’ resilience despite military offensives in their strongholds.

The target was the Crime Investigation Department headquarters, in a heavily secured neighborhood less than 100 yards from the provincial chief minister’s residence and not far from the U.S. consulate. The powerful blast created a 10-foot-wide crater in the ground and destroyed the CID building, along with several nearby residential buildings.

Salahuddin Babar Khattak, the top police official in Sindh province, said gunmen arrived at the CID building in a pickup truck loaded with explosives and opened fire on police officers stationed there. After police returned fire, the attackers detonated the explosives.

Pakistani television showed video of dazed men in bloodied shirts being led to ambulances, as well as children caked with dust being pulled from the rubble. The blast was heard miles away. At least 100 people were injured.

The Pakistani Taliban, through its spokesman, Azam Tariq, claimed responsibility for the attack.

This week Criminal Investigation Department officers arrested a Pakistani Taliban militant who had fled Bajaur, a tribal region on the Afghan border where Pakistani troops have been fighting to root out insurgents. On Wednesday, CID officers arrested several members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a militant group based in the Punjab region that has ties to the Pakistani Taliban.

Tariq said the attack was launched because “officials with the intelligence agencies arrest our people without bringing them to court, and kill and torture our people in police stations.”

Suspected militants who have been arrested are often taken to the CID building for interrogation, though it was unclear whether those arrested this week were in the building when it was attacked.

Since early 2009, the Pakistani army has launched several operations aimed at uprooting the Pakistani Taliban from its strongholds in the northwest, including the Swat Valley, Bajaur, South Waziristan and other tribal areas. The military has had some success in retaking those regions, but the operations have failed to prevent militants from carrying out periodic suicide bombings and ambushes across the country.

Thursday’s attack paralleled the 2009 commando-style raid on police and intelligence agency buildings in Lahore that killed 27 people and injured more than 250. In that attack, militants sprayed gunfire at police officers guarding the complex before ramming through a security gate and detonating explosives in a van.

Karachi, the country’s financial capital, has been besieged by violence this year, much of it so-called targeted killings, often motivated by political feuds and sectarian divisions.

The city has long been a haven for Pakistani and Afghan Taliban commanders and militants seeking refuge from the fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s volatile tribal belt. Because of this, Taliban leaders historically have spared the city the waves of suicide bombings other major Pakistani cities have suffered.

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Special correspondent Hanif Rehman in Karachi, Pakistan, contributed to this report.