Suicide bomber kills over 25 people in Pakistan’s Lahore

A suicide bomber killed at least 25 people, many of them police, in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Monday, officials said, an attack which shattered a period of relative calm in Pakistan’s second-largest city, Reuters reported.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack which wrought carnage near the Lahore Technology Park in the center of the city. Police deployed to clear street vendors from the area had been targeted, a police official said, Reuters added.

“We suspect that he (the suicide bomber) came on a motorcycle and he rammed it into a police checkpoint,” Lahore police operations chief Haider Ashraf told Reuters.

Rescue workers shifted the wounded to hospital and police officers cordoned off the bomb site as army troops also arrived at the scene, Reuters indicated.

“The death toll we have now is 25 dead and 52 are wounded,” said Jam Sajjad Hussain, spokesman for the Rescue 1122 service.

A wounded man sitting on the roadside was shown crying in pain on television amidst cars and motorcycles mangled by the blast, according to Reuters.