Suicide bombing death toll jumps to over 100

A Pakistani villager carries an injured person at the spot of bombing in Yakaghund in Pakistani tribal area of Mohmand on Friday. A suicide bomber on a motorcycle struck outside a government office Friday, killing scores of people and leaving many injured in an area where Pakistan’s army has been fighting the Taliban.

? The death toll from twin suicide bombings in Pakistan jumped to 102 with 115 people wounded today, making it the deadliest attack this year in the country.

Authorities continued to remove debris from the site of the attack in the village of Yakaghund in a northwest tribal region, after two bombers struck seconds apart Friday near a government office.

One of the bombs appeared fairly small but the other was huge, officials said. At least one bomber was on a motorcycle.

The attackers detonated their explosives near the office of Rasool Khan, a deputy Mohmand administrator who escaped unharmed. Tribal elders, including those involved in setting up militias to fight the Taliban, were in the building, but none was hurt, according to Mohmand chief administrator Amjad Ali Khan.

Video footage showed dozens of men searching through piles of yellow brick and mud rubble for survivors. Women and children were among the victims.

Mohmand is one of several areas in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt where Taliban and al-Qaida members are believed to be hiding.

Abdul Wadood, 19, was sitting in a vehicle at the time of the bombings.

“I only heard the deafening blast and lost consciousness,” said Wadood, who was being treated for head and arm wounds in Peshawar, the main city in the northwest, about 15 miles away. “I found myself on a hospital bed after opening my eyes. I think those who planned or carried out this attack are not humans.”

Some 70 to 80 shops were damaged or destroyed, while damage to a prison building allowed 28 prisoners — ordinary criminals, not militants — to flee, said Rasool Khan, who gave the casualty figures.

Friday’s was the deadliest attack this year in Pakistan. On New Year’s Day, a suicide car bomber struck a sports event near a meeting of tribesmen who supervise an anti-Taliban militia near the South Waziristan tribal area, killing 96 people.

Near the attack site, officials had been distributing wheelchairs Friday to disabled people and equipment to poor farmers, Amjad Ali Khan said. It was unclear how many participants in that event were among the victims.

Khan disputed reports that the aid was provided through U.S. funding, saying it came from Pakistani government funds.

However, U.S. Embassy spokesman Rick Snelsire confirmed that on the previous day Pakistani staff from a Washington-based contractor that receives USAID money had been giving out farm equipment in the village. The staff of that contractor, AED or Academy for Educational Development, were staying in the area, but were not believed to have been the targets Friday, Snelsire said.

Pakistani Taliban spokesmen could not be immediately reached after the attack. There were scattered reports the militant group’s branch in Mohmand had claimed responsibility and said it was targeting the elders.

The Pakistani army has carried out operations in Mohmand, but it has been unable to extirpate the militants. Its efforts to rely on citizen militias to take on the militants have had limited success there.

Nevertheless, there have been fewer attacks in Pakistan this year than in previous years — most notably in the northwest. In the last three months of 2009, more than 500 people were killed in a surge of attacks in the country.

Although information from the tribal belt is difficult to verify independently, the Pakistani army’s operations and U.S. missile strikes are believed to have calmed the situation since then.

U.S. Sens. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, and Jack Reed, a committee member, visited Pakistani officials in Islamabad on Friday. In a statement issued after his meeting with the American lawmakers, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said both countries should try harder to increase mutual trust.