Suicide bomber kills three in Pakistan

A suicide bomber killed three people on Monday in the second attack in Pakistan's city of Peshawar in 24 hours as the military suffered further losses during a major anti-Taliban offensive.

Police said the bomber got out of a rickshaw and detonated his explosives at a police checkpoint on the outer ring road of the northwestern metropolis, which runs into the Al-Qaeda and Taliban-infested tribal belt.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has suffered a wave of Islamist bombings since July 2007, has been rocked by a spike in bloodshed killing more than 350 people since early October and forcing troops onto the offensive in the tribal area.

"The driver stopped his (the bomber's) rickshaw at the checkpoint and a police constable asked him to get out but he appeared reluctant," policeman Asmatullah Khan, who watched the attack from behind sandbags, told AFP.

"The constable tried to drag him out. He blew himself up soon after stepping out of the vehicle. The rickshaw driver also died."

Officials said three people were killed -- a policeman and two civilians.

The blast destroyed two vehicles, left the rickshaw a mangled wreck, damaged a police van and splattered blood on the road at the small checkpoint, where police had erected barricades to search cars, an AFP reporter said.

Suicide attacks and bombings frequently strike the sprawling conservative Muslim city of 2.5 million people. In the deadliest attack in Pakistan in two years, a massive car bomb killed 118 people in a Peshawar market on October 28.

Doctor Zafar Iqbal at the city's main government-run Lady Reading Hospital said four bodies, including that of the bomber, were brought to the morgue.

"We received four bodies, one police official and two civilians. The fourth body was that of the suicide attacker. It was unrecognisable," he told AFP.

The attack came a day after a suicide bomber killed 14 people in a crowded cattle market in Peshawar, with devout Muslims making preparations to buy meat for the Eid al-Adha festival later this month.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for that attack, saying it was in retaliation for efforts by Mayor Abdul Malik, who was killed, to raise a militia to fight Islamist rebels after he cut close links to the hardline movement in 2008.

The United States has put Pakistan on the frontline of its war against Al-Qaeda, increasingly disturbed by deteriorating security in the country where suicide attacks and bombings have killed more than 2,450 people in 28 months.

The government blames most of the attacks on Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has vowed to avenge an offensive against its strongholds and the killing of their leader Baitullah Mehsud in a US missile attack in August.

Military officials said four soldiers died Sunday in a roadside bomb attack -- the type deployed by the Taliban to such deadly effect against US and NATO troops across the border in Afghanistan.

The army press office said the soldiers died in a rocket attack on a checkpoint in Makin. The toll made it one of the deadliest single counter-attacks since the offensive was launched on October 17.

Further to the north in the lawless tribal belt, where US officials say Al-Qaeda are plotting attacks on the West, a roadside bomb killed two paramilitary soldiers in Bajaur district on Monday, officials said.

The Taliban have stepped up attacks in Bajaur in an apparent bid to deflect attention away from South Waziristan, where around 30,000 Pakistani troops are pressing their most ambitious offensive to date against the TTP.

The military says around 486 militants and 46 soldiers have been killed since the offensive began, but security officials and analysts say that many Islamist rebels have simply fled rather than staying to fight.

The military provides the only regular information coming from the frontlines. None of the details can be verified because communication lines are down and journalists and aid workers barred from the area.