Twin Pakistan explosions injure nine

Twin bomb explosions Wednesday in Pakistan's northwestern town of Akora Khattak injured nine people including policemen and journalists, police said. The two bombs exploded in the tomb of a Pashtoon nationalist leader, Ajmal Khattak, spreading panic in the town, 40 kilometres (25 miles) east of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa province. "Intial investigations revealed that three time devices had been planted in the tomb, which went off with a big bang but nobody was injured," local police official Hayat Ullah told AFP. Journalists rushed to the site to cover the event and while they were collecting details of the incident from police, the second remote-controlled blast took place. "The second blast occurred after more than one hour injuring five policemen and four local television journalists," the official said. Another senior local police official, Muhammad Hussain also confirmed the incident. Nobody has so far claimed responsibility for the attacks but provincial information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said Islamist militants were responsible for targetting the tomb. Northwest Pakistan suffers from chronic insecurity, largely connected to the semi-autonomous tribal belt near Afghanistan, which Washington calls the most dangerous place on Earth and a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda. Pakistan has battled homegrown insurgents in the tribal belt for years. More than 3,000 soldiers have died but Pakistan has resisted US pressure to do more to eliminate havens used by insurgents fighting the Americans in Afghanistan. According to an AFP tally, around 5,000 people have been killed in militant attacks across the country since July 2007, when government troops raided an extremist mosque in the capital Islamabad, sparking a bloody insurgency.