Suicide Blast Murders Eight, Injure Twenty Six

Eight people were killed and 26 injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a hotel in a Shiite minority neighbourhood in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar on Tuesday, officials said.
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“Eight people were killed and twenty six have been injured in a suicide blast outside a local hotel yards away from an Imambargah (worship place of the Shiites),” senior police official Faisal Mukhtar told AFP.
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Shafqat Malik, chief of Peshawar’s Bomb Disposal Unit, confirmed that it was a suicide blast.
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Jamil Shah, a spokesman for the city’s government- run Leady Reading Hospital confirmed the casualties.
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“Eight dead bodies have been brought to the hospital along with 26 injured,” he said.
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An AFP correspondent present at the scene said police had cordoned off the area and rescue workers were moving the injured to hospital.
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“There is complete darkness and we cannot see anything except ambulance lights,” the AFP correspondent said.
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The Pakistani Taliban, which has carried out a bloody campaign against the state, distanced itself from the blast.
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“We have no role in the blast and it was not carried out by the Pakistani Taliban,” Shahid Ullah Shahid, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban told AFP.