A SUICIDE attacker killed the chief of Pakistan’s Frontier Constabulary and two other people in a bombing in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
“The suicide attack targeted Sifwat Ghayoor and he has been martyred,” said Bashir Bilour, senior minister in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
“We are investigating whether the bomber was on foot or in a car.”
The body of what appeared to be a teenage boy lay at the bomb site. His head and legs were severed, an AFP reporter said.
Police said two more people were killed and 11 others wounded.
Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Taliban faction claimed responsibility for the killing and threatened more such assassinations.
“We killed him, he was our target… all such officers who are active against us will suffer the same fate,” Azam Tariq, a spokesman for Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, said by telephone.
Mr Ghayoor was a highly regarded commander of the Frontier Constabularly, which assists other security force detachments in military operations against Pakistani Taliban militants in the northwest.
The target was also a former police chief of Peshawar, the northwestern capital that has been on the frontline of a Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked bombing campaign that has killed more than 3574 people in the last three years.
The precise nature of how the attack was carried out remained unclear.
“It seems the attacker was on foot. He was 13- to 14-years-old and he blew himself up near Sifwat Ghayoor’s car, but we are still investigating it further,” Shafqat Malik, bomb disposal chief in Peshawar, said.
But one witness told Geo television that he saw the explosion after a car approached the vehicle in which Mr Ghayoor had been in.
Two vehicles were seen engulfed in flames after the attack.
It was the first deadly suicide attack since July 26 when a bomber killed seven people as he targeted senior Pakistani officials mourning the murdered son of a northwestern cabinet minister.
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