Pat Dollard

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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A suicide bomber attacked a Pakistani military vehicle in the city of Rawalpindi on Monday, killing the army’s top medical officer, two of his staff and five passers-by, officials said.

The blast happened a week after Pakistan held largely peaceful parliamentary elections and was the first bomb attack outside the violence-plagued northwest since the vote.

“The general was on his way home and his car was stopped at a traffic light. The bomber was on foot and blew himself up there,” said Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema.

He said the bomber was about 16 years old and also killed five civilians and wounded 12 others.

The Pakistan military headquarters is in Rawalpindi and several major attacks on the military and security agencies have taken place in the city since the middle of last year.

Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and more than 20 of her supporters were killed in a gun and suicide bomb attack as she left a rally in Rawalpindi on December 27.

Monday’s blast was outside an office of the government’s national data registration agency, on a main road crowded with mid-afternoon traffic.

“I can see pieces of flesh littering the road and four damaged vehicles,” a witness said, adding police and troops cordoned off the site of the attack.

AID AGENCY ATTACKED

Pakistan has been hit by a wave of bomb and suicide attacks since troops stormed a radical mosque complex in the capital, Islamabad, last July.

The government has blamed the attacks on al Qaeda-linked militants based in remote mountains on the Afghan border and says they are intent on destabilizing the country.

The United States and other Western allies are trying to help the Pakistani military in its battle against the militants.

Chief of General Staff of the British Army General, Sir David Dannatt, arrived in Pakistan on Sunday for a week-long visit as part of Britain’s defense cooperation, the British High Commission said.

In a separate incident, unidentified attackers threw a bomb into an office a foreign aid agency, Plan International, in the northwestern town of Mansehra, killing one people and wounding eight, two of them critically, a government official said.

The dead and wounded were Pakistanis, he said.

“The office caught fire and after the fire is out we will know if there are other casualties,” Mazahar-ul-Haq, a senior police of