Explosion kills at leats 5 in Peshawar

An explosion in a market killed at least five people and injured more than 30 in northwest Pakistan's violence-torn Peshawar city Monday, police said. Geo News said the blast targeted the Nishtarabad compact disc market area. Bashir Bilour, a minister in the Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa provincial government, said police suspect the bomb was hidden in a motorcycle and set off with a remote device. Peshawar is the provincial capital. Those killed included a woman and two young boys, News International reported. "People were returning home when the bomb went off in the busy part of the old city," a police official said. The explosion damaged a number of nearby shops and vehicles passing through the area. Geo News reported the death toll at five but CNN reported six people had been killed. Dawn newspaper quoted a source at a hospital where the injured were taken as saying the death toll could go up as some of them were in critical condition. In another violent incident earlier Monday, a Taliban suicide bomber set off his explosives-laden car in front of the residence of a senior police intelligence official in the southern port city of Karachi, killing eight people, six of them policemen. The police official and his family, however, were not hurt.