Bomb kills seven in Khyber Agency

PESHAWAR: A bomb killed seven Pakistani soldiers and wounded 11 others Saturday in the country’s northwestern tribal area, officials said.

‘Seven paramilitary soldiers were killed and 11 were wounded in the remote-control bomb attack,’ Shafirullah Khan, the top administrative official of Khyber tribal district, told AFP by telephone.

The Frontier Corps later issued a statement confirming that seven of its members had ‘embraced martyrdom’. It gave their names and said they died in an improvised explosive device blast.

Military and security officials in nearby Peshawar city said two vehicles carrying rations for Pakistani troops were destroyed in the blast.

It occurred about 15 kilometers west of Peshawar.

Khyber is on the main supply route through Pakistan to Afghanistan, where international forces are battling a Taliban insurgency.

The semi-autonomous northwest tribal belt has become a stronghold for hundreds of extremists who fled Afghanistan after a US-led invasion toppled the hardliner Islamic Taliban regime there in late 2001.