Negative Blogs

China is reeling from a surge of attacks on innocent children and the country is searching for answers while beefing up security for schools.

In the most recent attack, a local farmer in Shandong province injured five pre-school children and a teacher before burning himself to death.

Two children were saved from his grip.

It was the fourth attack in a month on schools and children in China.

On Thursday, a middle-aged man armed with a knife wounded 28 children and three adults at a kindergarten in Jiangsu province, eastern China. Five children were left in a critical condition.

On Wednesday, a teacher on sick leave because of a mental illness wounded 16 children and a staff member at a primary school in Guangdong province.

The same day, another man was executed for murdering eight children last month outside an elementary school in Fujian province.

The education ministry has formed an emergency panel to tackle the violence and some local police authorities have distributed such instruments as steel pitchforks and pepper spray to security guards in schools.

‘Social revenge’

China used to take pride in its low rate of violent crimes but now has to deal with them almost every day, leading many to ask what has caused the sudden surge of apparently random attacks.

The wave of violence has been dubbed cases of “social revenge” in China.

Ji Jianlin, a professor of clinical psychology at Shanghai’s Fudan University, says the incidents share some common features.

“The attackers all have grudges against society. They all try to take revenge by attacking the young and vulnerable,” he says.

In part, it reflects the social tension caused by rampant corruption and inequality. But Prof Ji points out that there is a lack of social and psychological support in the rapidly changing society.

“In the past, China’s workers used to have social support from the unions or women’s associations. They used to provide quite adequate support. It’s now quite weak.”

This is especially true in smaller cities and towns. In a country where people used to be looked after from cradle to grave, the social change has not only left many Chinese without their traditional support mechanism but also pushed a large number of people into relative poverty.

And the income gap is widening further between the rich and poor.

This, coupled with a changed attitude towards life, has driven many to extremes in their desperate attempt to come to terms with the law of the jungle prevalent there.

On top of that, there is still a stigma in Chinese culture about people needing psychological counselling.

Family members and society as a whole tend to conceal or shun those with mental problems. This may partly lead to attackers failing to get help before they commit crimes.

There is also suspicion that widespread reports of the attacks may have encouraged copycats. Three out of the four recent attacks were carried out with knives.

Whatever the causes may be, the parents of the victims are paying a high price.

By Shirong Chen

China has been shocked by the outburst of violent crime.

Four young children are reported to have died after a former insurance salesman slashed and stabbed his way through a kindergarten in southern China, in the second such attack in as many days.

The well-regarded Caijing magazine said that four children were killed in this morning’s s attack. Officials declined to comment.

The man stabbed 28 children as well as a teacher, a security guard and a school volunteer who tried to protect the terrified four-year-olds.

Coming less than 24 hours after a mentally ill former teacher hacked at 15 pupils and a teacher in a southern China primary school, the attack has sparked nationwide outrage and heartsearching about why children have become targets.

Officials said that Xu Yuyuan, 47, broke into a classroom at the nursery school in Taixing city in southeastern Jiangsu province at about 9.40am today and attacked the children with a 20cm (9in) knife.

A photograph from the scene showed blood spattered across the school steps — presumably as the wounded were rushed to hospital.

A staff member at the Taixing No 1 People’s Hospital said that some of the wounded were being treated there. He said: “The injured have been sent here one after another. The doctors are now trying their best to save them.”

Five of the children were in critical condition in hospital in Jiangsu province, said Zhu Guiming, an official with the propaganda department in Taixing city. However, officials told state media that no deaths had been reported and the condition of the most badly hurt was stabilising.

Police have arrested Mr Xu, who was described as unemployed after having worked for a local insurance company until 2001.

Yesterday a 33-year-old man with a history of mental illness rushed into classrooms at the Leizhou primary school in southern Guangdong province, brandishing a knife about a foot long. He injured 16 children and a teacher, stabbing them in the back arms and head. None of the victims was reported to be in serious condition.

The man then made his way to a top-floor balcony, from which threatened to throw himself off, before being arrested.

Several schools across China have been the subject of similar attacks in recent yeas, provoking anger from parents and the meda.

Hours before the primary school attack, state media announced the execution of a former medical worker who stabbed to death eight children on March 23 as they waited for the gates to open for morning classes at their school in eastern Fujian province. Zheng Minsheng, 41, told the court that he carried had out the attack in a fit of rage after splitting from his girlfriend.

Across the internet, the only forum for popular discussion in China, chatrooms were filled with anger at the latest attack. One comment read: “Governments, let me ask, what crime has the next generation committed and why can criminals bring these tragedies to innocent children? I appeal to the government to save our children.” Another wrote: “Our government should pause to consider seriously just what the problem is here.”

One expert attributed the string of attacks on schoolchildren to increasing social problems. Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at Renmin University in Beijing, said that the choice of schoolchildren as victims could be a form of copycat phenomenon. This sort of violent attack often happened in clusters, he said.

“It’s like suicide, which is another type of mental health problem that can spread in a community. Normally, with these kind of violent events we hope the media won’t blow them up too much. Because that tends to make it spread.”

By Jane Macartney

A woman holding a baby stands near the gate of Zhongxin Kindergarten where a class of 4-year-olds were attacked by a knife-wielding man in Taixing, in east China's Jiangsu Province.

BANGKOK — Antigovernment protesters clashed on Wednesday with security forces who fired their weapons in a short, sharp encounter on the edge of the city.

One soldier was killed and at least 18 people were injured, according to the government-run Erawan Medical Center.

Standing behind coils of razor wire and taking aim from behind concrete pilings, troops fired into the air and into the crowd to c, who had arrived in a long convoy of motorcycles and trucks

The Associated Press reported that witnesses said the soldier appeared to have been shot by other security forces.

Earlier in the day, an army spokesman, Col. Sansern Kaewkamnerd, said that soldiers mostly used rubber bullets but were authorized to use live ammunition in self-defense.

Protesters charged the razor wire and threw rocks and bottles, some of them from a highway overpass near Bangkok’s second-largest airport, Don Muang.

The encounter came after the protesters — who have largely discarded their trademark red shirts — made a rare foray from their camps in the center of Bangkok, where they have forced the closing of shopping malls and major hotels.

The protesters, who mostly represent the rural and urban poor and whose demonstrations have paralyzed parts of the capital for nearly seven weeks, say they will not relent until the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva resigns and holds a new election. At least 26 people have been killed in the protests.

Many support the fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and say they were robbed of their votes when he was ousted in a coup in 2006 and when later governments aligned with him were removed through court rulings.

The government has responded that it was duly elected by a parliamentary vote and that it will not give in to street protests.

The city is tense, with daily rumors of a military crackdown.

On Tuesday, soldiers in body armor set up command posts at several points in the city after the protesters said they would set out Wednesday in convoys around the city.

The protesters avoided these posts and headed toward the airport road in a procession led by a pack of hundreds of motorcycles.

Thousands of people on the backs of trucks waved flags and sang and danced to loud music that blasted through megaphones.

After the clash, soldiers took an aggressive stance, stopping and searching vehicles on the nearby Vibhavadi highway, the main gateway from the north, an area largely sympathetic to the protests.

They guarded the road into the airport and patrolled the highway on foot and on motorcycles.

For their part, the protesters turned their trucks and motorcycles around and headed back into the city, waving at the police.

By SETH MYDANS

A Thai soldier during clashes with anti-government protesters on the outskirts of Bangkok on Wednesday.

Petty squabbles earlier hindered the climate change battle.

Tackling climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing South Asia. Regional leaders are meeting in Bhutan this week, but are they any nearer agreeing to an action plan? The BBC’s Navin Singh Khadka reports.

The issue of climate change is the main item on the agenda of the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) summit under way in the Bhutanese capital Thimpu.

But given the poor track record of co-operation achieved by the regional grouping over other sensitive issues in the past, will the thorny issue of climate change become bogged down in rhetoric and recriminations?

Experts say the vulnerability of the region to climate change means that there is an urgent need for concrete action.

Words not action

“South Asian countries have started to face the effects of climate change and are particularly at risk,” says the United Nations Environment Programme’s (Unep) 2009 outlook.

“Intense floods, droughts and cyclones have impacted on the economic performances of South Asian countries and the lives of millions of poor, it also puts at risk infrastructure, agriculture, human health, water resources and the environment,” it says.

This is not the first time that Saarc summit has discussed the issue.

The declaration of the 14th summit in Delhi in 2007, for instance, said leaders had agreed “to commission a team of regional experts to identify collective actions in sharing of knowledge on the consequences of climate change”.

A year later, the 15th Saarc summit adopted the Dhaka Declaration on climate change.

But, experts say, hardly any of these words have been matched by actions.

In its climate change national action plan launched two years ago, India - the main regional player - stressed the need for co-operation.

“We will need to exchange information with South Asian countries and countries sharing the Himalayan ecology,” the plan read.

“Co-operation with neighbouring countries will be sought to make a comprehensive network for observation and monitoring of the Himalayan environment, to assess fresh water resources and the health of the ecosystem.”

There have been no serious follow-up since this bold pronouncement was made.

Drought

With regional co-operation confined to academic papers, key issues like regional flood forecasting are just not happening.

“Some countries in the region are not willing to share water-related data because they regard it as confidential,” says Mats Eriksson, a senior hydrologist with the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development which has spent years trying to bring together South Asian countries for flood forecasting at a regional level.

But as millions of people in South Asia suffer from floods every monsoon, there is a worrying and growing uncertainty over the uneven distribution of monsoon rainfall in the region.

In recent years, some places have experienced heavy rainfall while others have seen far smaller amounts - and have even been hit by drought.

“Climate change could influence monsoon dynamics and cause lower summer precipitation, a delay to the start of the monsoon season and longer breaks between the rainy periods,” a study by Purdue University in the US found recently.

While everyone now seems to be well informed as to the extent of the problem, questions remain over Saarc’s response to it. But not everyone is pessimistic.

“This is the first time you have a Saarc summit where the leaders of countries in the region are getting together on a very specific subject and I am optimistic,” said the chairman of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, who also heads the Energy Research Institute in Delhi.

Ainun Nishat, climate chief for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Bangladesh, is also positive.

“I believe frequent contact between the leaders is essentially the first step that will lead to some concrete action because they always want to show progress.”

But recent international climate negotiations, such as last year’s Copenhagen summit, have shown that the countries in the region have different interests.

India’s fast-growing economy, for instance, wants a global climate treaty that requires rich nations - and not rapidly developing countries - to cut carbon emissions.

It also wants global temperature rises to be limited to 2C from pre-industrial levels.

Bitter disputes

Whereas least developed countries in the region that are most vulnerable to climate change are lobbying for an international treaty irrespective of who has to reduce carbon emissions.

They want global warming to be limited to 1.5C from pre-industrial levels.

“I therefore do not expect Saarc countries to take common action in terms of dealing with climate change,” says noted Indian environment activist Sunita Narain.

“I expect governments of the region to use Saarc as a meeting point in which they can put forward their respective actions against climate change.”

But is that possible when major region players like India and Pakistan, for example, are engaged in bitter disputes?

One of the latest disputes between the South Asian nuclear rivals is that of sharing of water resources which, experts fear, will get worse as the climate change problem itself remains unaddressed.

The climate change issue urgently demands a meeting of minds.

Ambassador Tim Torlot narrowly escapes death after blast near convoy.
Operations by al-Qaida in Arabian Peninsula include bombing US embassy.

Tim Torlot, Britain’s ambassador to Yemen, travels with a UK close protection team as well as a local police escort, so it was not only a matter of luck that he managed to escape the suicide bomber who targeted him in Sana’a today.

No claim of responsibility was immediately forthcoming, but the attack bore the familiar hallmarks of the Yemen-based al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the most active “franchises” of Osama Bin Laden’s organisation.

AQAP was little known outside intelligence circles until last Christmas Day, when it set alarm bells ringing with the abortive “underpants bombing” of a US airline over Detroit. It is now a high-priority target for the US and Britain as well as for a Yemeni government that faces far more serious problems than terrorism and has been cajoled into taking firmer action.

Experts agree that conventional military action is likely to have limited success and risks being counterproductive. A US-led air strike on the remote Shabwa governorate – one of the country’s “ungoverned spaces” – a week before the Detroit incident killed scores of civilians, a point that was hammered home by the organisation in a recent audiotape.

AQAP, led by Nasser al-Wahayshi and Qasim al-Raymi, started life as a union between the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al-Qaida after the Saudis in effect defeated their own jihadis. Last summer there was shock when the deputy Saudi minister for internal security narrowly escaped death in an abortive attack by a Yemeni suicide bomber.

Its ability to mount an attack in Sana’a will be alarming but is not new. The group’s most audacious operations include the bombing of the US embassy in the capital – now, like the British mission, heavily guarded – and a prison escape that is believed to have been carried out with the connivance of government officials.

Intelligence experts and diplomats say there is little evidence of the arrival in Yemen of al-Qaida veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan and believe most AQAP members are homegrown extremists. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian “underpants bomber”, was a student at one of the Arabic-language colleges in Sana’a.

The difficulty for the US is avoiding a high-profile presence that will backfire on President Ali Abdulah Salih, an ally in fighting terrorism who is sensitive to charges of being an American stooge. But there are credible reports of CIA and US special forces assistance to the Yemeni security forces. The US has also announced its intention to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaqi, the US-born radical preacher who tutored Abdulmutalab.

Yemenis say al-Qaida is far from the most serious problem facing the Arab world’s poorest country. It suffers from war in the north (a ceasefire is holding), secessionist unrest in the south, extreme poverty, water shortages and diminishing oil income – and is often described as a state that is in grave danger of failing.

The British ambassador may have been targeted because the UK has a large mission in Sana’a, places special emphasis on development and has provided training for Yemeni security forces.

Gordon Brown convened a conference in London in January to better co-ordinate international efforts to help Yemen in the wake of the Christmas Day bombing.

By Ian Black

Sana'a in Yemen, where an explosion targeted the British ambassador's convoy, killing one person. Photograph: Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images.

Attacks Could Be Backlash After Iraq Touted Series Of Blows Against al Qaeda.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A series of bombs targeting Shi’ite areas rocked Baghdad Friday, killing at least 56 people in an apparent backlash after Iraq touted a series of blows against a weakened al Qaeda-led insurgency.

Eight people were also killed by bombs in the Sunni west of the country, less than a week after Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. troops killed al Qaeda’s top two leaders in Iraq.

Thirteen blasts hit different areas of the Iraqi capital around the time of Muslim prayers, mostly near Shi’ite mosques and at a marketplace, an Interior Ministry source said.

Three bombs targeted worshippers outside the main office of fiery anti-American Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the crowded Sadr City slum. Those blasts killed 39 people and wounded 56, generating denunciations of the security forces. Some youths threw stones at an Iraqi army vehicle.

“Why do they always target us? We are peaceful people. We come to pray and then go on our way,” one survivor told Reuters Television in an angry tirade, without identifying himself.

The attacks, one of Iraq’s deadliest in recent weeks, also wounded around 120 people and signaled the possibility of a rise in violence after a March national election produced no clear winner and left a power vacuum for insurgents to exploit.

“Targeting prayers in areas with a certain majority,” Baghdad security spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said, referring to Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim majority, “is a revenge for the losses suffered by al Qaeda.

“We expect such terrorist acts to continue.”

Last Sunday, al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the purported head of its affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq, were killed in a raid in a rural area northwest of Baghdad by Iraqi and U.S. forces.

The strike against al Qaeda’s Iraq leadership has been accompanied by a string of smaller battlefield victories in which more than 300 suspected al Qaeda operatives have been arrested and 19 killed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

By Muhanad Mohammed

Men carry a victim injured in one of a series of parked car bombs in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, April 23, 2010. Triple bombings hit a Sadrist office Friday as worshippers were finishing their prayers, killing 14 and wounding an estimated 75 in a rash of attacks on Shiites across Iraq's capital.Explosions outside three other Shiite mosques in Baghdad, all timed around the end of Friday's prayers, appeared to be the work of insurgents looking anew to inflame sectarian tensions.

BAGHDAD — A series of bombings on Friday struck mosques, a market and a shop in Baghdad, as well as the homes of a prosecutor and police officers in western Iraq, killing dozens, only five days after a joint Iraqi-American raid killed the top two leaders of the insurgency.

Iraq’s leaders had hailed the killings and arrests of insurgent leaders this week as a devastating blow to the group known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but warned that retaliation was almost certain to come. It was not clear that the group, also known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, was behind the latest jolt of violence.

The attacks were the worst of an intermittent wave of bombings since the parliamentary election on March 7, providing a violent backdrop to stalled efforts to finalize the results of the vote and form a new government.

According to preliminary accounts by the Ministry of the Interior, 12 bombs — including car bombs and improvised explosive devices, but not suicide bombers, an insurgent hallmark — killed at least 50 people in Baghdad and wounded more than 100. In Anbar, the sprawling mostly Sunni province to the west, seven people died when a series of explosions struck houses in a small village.

The deadliest attacks struck near three mosques in Sadr City, the Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, just as worshipers departed Friday afternoon prayers. Those attacks, involving car bombs, occurred near the headquarters of the political movement led by the cleric Moktada al-Sadr. The movement’s candidates did well in last month’s election, giving them increased leverage in forming a government its leaders say should not include the incumbent prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

The attacks came a day after senior Iraqi officials said that the previously undisclosed arrest of a senior insurgent leader in Baghdad last month had provided a breakthrough that has allowed Iraqi and American security forces to kill or arrests dozens of the group’s leaders and fighters.

The deaths of the two leaders and the killings and arrests that followed — with 12 more suspects seized in raids in Baghdad and Mosul, in the north, on Thursday — may be the most significant blow yet to a deadly movement that only a few months ago appeared to be regrouping, the officials said.

The officials asserted that the series of raids, and the apparent cooperation of the leader arrested last month, had devastated the group’s leadership ranks, its financing and possibly its links to Al Qaeda’s international leaders on the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“The map of the entire insurgency in Iraq is now clear to us,” Sharwan al-Waili, the minister of national security affairs, said Thursday.

The lasting impact on Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remains to be seen, given the group’s resilience and previous overstatements by American and Iraqi officials of its imminent demise. Many details of the recent raids remain secret, and thus impossible to verify. Mr. Maliki’s government is also eager to portray itself as strong on security as negotiations continue to form a coalition after the March 7 election. Any significant weakening of the group could help smooth the Obama administration’s primary goal in Iraq: the steady withdrawal of combat forces by the end of the summer. The withdrawal has appeared increasingly uncertain because of the political impasse over the election.

Mr. Waili and the senior Iraqi military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said that the intelligence trove resulted from the arrest on March 11 of a man who was called Al Qaeda’s “governor” of Baghdad, Manaf Abdul Rahim al-Rawi.

His arrest had not been previously announced, as Iraqi security officials quietly gathered what General Atta called “a huge quantity of important documents and information that were and are useful for the security agencies.”

Mr. Waili said Mr. Rawi’s arrest had led to the “dismantling of the entire network” over the month that followed, culminating in Sunday’s raid and another in Mosul on Tuesday that killed Ahmed al-Obeidi, said to be the group’s leader in three provinces in northern Iraq.

With the arrest of the Baghdad governor, it appeared that the group’s principal leadership had been sundered. “We have reliable information indicating that there is a state of confusion among Al Qaeda now,” General Atta said at a news conference.

In the past, however, new leaders have sprung up to replace those killed. General Atta also warned that retaliatory attacks were possible.

General Atta said that Mr. Rawi had planned and supervised a series of catastrophic attacks in Baghdad that began last August on government buildings, universities, hotels and, before the election, polling stations.

Those bombings killed hundreds, disrupted government functions and heightened anxiety across the capital.

The successes in striking Al Qaeda’s leadership appeared to reflect improved coordination between the American military and Iraqi forces.

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

People rushed to extinguish a burning car moments after a bomb exploded in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad on Friday.

Rohan Vos, Rovos Railways: “We had a lot of Americans on the train”
Brake failure is being investigated as the possible cause of a luxury train crash in South Africa which killed four people, a safety official says.

The train derailed near the capital, Pretoria, on Wednesday with 55 tourists on board and 30 members of staff.

The victims were all female employees, one of whom was four months pregnant and went into labour at the scene, losing her baby.

According to train owners Rovos Rail, seven people remain in hospital.

Rovos Rail’s Rohan Vos said one person is in a critical condition, the South African Press Association reports.

There were about 40 US tourists, along with French, German and British citizens, on board the Pride of Africa when it derailed.

Mr Vos told Associated Press news agency that the passengers had been relatively safe in wood-panelled carriages - some dating back to the 1920s - but the staff had been in a kitchen area that was less protected.

Emergency worker Chris Botha at the scene said the railway coaches were lying on top of each other.

“It’s absolute carnage,” he told AFP news agency.

Rail Safety Regulator spokesman Carvel Webb said a full report into the causes of the accident would take two weeks.

“It appears from the initial measurement and assessment that were done that there was not adequate braking left on the train during the coupling and uncoupling process,” AFP quotes him telling South Africa’s Radio 702.

Rovos Rail offers “unique train safaris” and some of its coaches have hot showers and air conditioning.

The two-day Cape Town-Pretoria trip can cost from about $1,500 (£974) to nearly $3,000 per passenger, AP reports.

(CNN) — At least 11 people were missing and seven were critically injured after an explosion on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.

The explosion happened about 10 p.m. CT (11 p.m. ET) Tuesday on a rig named the Deepwater Horizon. It was about 52 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana, said Coast Guard Senior Chief Petty Officer Mike O’Berry.

At the time of the explosion, 126 were on board the rig, O’Berry said.

The Coast Guard said it sent helicopters from New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, to help evacuate people from the rig and look for the missing. The Coast Guard also sent four cutters to the rig.

Several people were hospitalized, including at least two, who were taken to a mobile trauma center.

The company that owns the rig, Transocean Ltd., said most crew members are safe.

“A substantial majority of the 126-member crew is safe, but some crew members remain unaccounted for at this time,” the company said.

The company describes itself as the “world’s largest offshore drilling contractor,” saying it has 140 offshore drilling units.

Transocean said its crisis teams are working with the Coast Guard and lease operator BP Exploration & Production Inc. to “care for all rig personnel and search for missing rig personnel.”

“The names and hometowns of injured persons are being withheld until family members can be notified,” the company said.

The Coast Guard released two videos related to the blast.

One shows an injured person being hauled into a rescue helicopter.

“The survivor is just outside the cabin — take it up slow, take it up slow,” a voice instructs as a basket carrying the person is winched up from the platform. A rescuer steadies the cable with his hand and stops the basket’s spinning as the survivor reaches the helicopter.

The video shows a rescuer on the platform moving away from the basket after it lifts off.

The other clip shows a person being taken by stretcher off a Coast Guard rescue helicopter in New Orleans.

“Bring me two cots,” an emergency worker shouts as the first stretcher is wheeled away from the HH-60 helicopter.

By the CNN Wire Staff

Flames shoot up from the oil rig after Tuesday night's explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

Police in northwestern Pakistan say two separate bomb explosions in the city of Peshawar have killed at least 23 people and wounded many others.  The violence-hit city is the gateway to Afghanistan.

Police say that most of the deaths occurred when a suicide bomber attacked a rally in Peshawar’s busy Qissa Khawani market.  Activists of the right-wing religious party, Jamaat-i-Islami, had organized the rally to protest against frequent power cuts in the city.

Those killed in the attack include a senior police officer, his security guard and several rally leaders.  The city police chief says the slain police officer and his colleagues were apparently the target of the deadly attack.

An eyewitness told reporters on the scene the bomber was a teenage boy who detonated the device as the rally was about to disperse.  

The man says the blast instantly killed and wounded many people, but fears of a second explosion kept people away from helping the victims for a while.  

Police say they have found the head of the suicide bomber and an investigation is underway.  

The attack occurred hours after a bomb exploded outside a school run by a police welfare foundation.  A six-year-old boy was killed and at least eight others were wounded in the blast.

Provincial Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain tells VOA the violence is the work of Taliban extremists, in retaliation for security forces dismantling their bases.

The minister says these terrorists are like beasts and they are killing innocent people.  But he says the violence will not deter the government’s campaign aimed at eliminating the militants.  

The attacks in Peshawar follow three bomb blasts over the weekend in the nearby town of Kohat that killed around 50 people.

Pakistani security forces have conducted frequent raids against al-Qaida and Taliban militants in the country’s northwestern tribal areas, which border Afghanistan.  Officials believe the security operations have provoked the militants to carry out attacks on security forces, mosques, schools, public places and markets, leaving thousand of people dead in recent years.

by Ayaz Gul

Pakistani rescue workers collect the remains of victims at the site of bomb explosion at a market in Peshawar.