Tuesday 22 December 2009

Suicide bomb attack on Peshawar Press Club


A suicide bomber has killed at least three people outside the Peshawar Press Club in Pakistan, the BBC reports today.
A policeman, a Peshawar Press Club worker and a woman passer-by were killed. At least 17 others were wounded, several of them journalists.
"It was a suicide attack. The bomber wanted to enter the building. The police official at the gate stopped him and he blew himself up," AFP news agency quoted senior police official Karim Khan as saying.
Journalists in Pakistan have been targeted by militants on numerous occasions.
Peshawar, near the Afghan border, has been attacked repeatedly since Pakistan sent its troops to fight the Taliban in the tribal region of South Waziristan.
The Committe to Protect Journalists condemned the attack. "This is clearly an outright assault on local journalists working in the most troubled part of Pakistan —the border areas with Afghanistan,” said Bob Dietz, CPJ’s Asia programme coordinator. “The reporters there have been under pressure for years from all sides to the conflict, but this marks one of the worst, most overt attempts to silence the media there.”

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