Blast kills 25 at Pakistan rally

“We’ve been told 14 people were killed and 24 wounded. Apparently, it was suicide attack,” said the ministry spokesman, Javed Iqbal Cheema. But other sources put the toll at 16.

The provincial president of the Awami National Party, Afrasiab Khattak, who was addressing the rally in the town of Charsadda in North West Frontier Province, told Dawn Television he was safe.

“There was an explosion at my meeting, there was a big bang and I saw some people getting hit. I’m fine,” he said. A senior provincial official said no party leader was killed.

The ANP is a secular party competing with religious parties in the legislative elections which were postponed from January 8 after opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed in a suicide attack on December 27.

Some Pakistanis believe President Pervez Musharraf, whose popularity has slumped over the past year and whose allies look set to do badly in the vote, might use violence as an excuse to postpone the elections again.

The government has blamed an al Qaeda-linked militant leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who is based in the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border, for the attack on Bhutto and many of the other recent attacks across the country. The military has stepped up operations against Mehsud in recent weeks and security analysts fear the militants will launch more attacks in the run-up to the vote as part of their campaign to destabilise the country.