PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Bombs destroyed an Internet cafe, wrecked a bus carrying handicapped children and spread panic through Pakistan’s main northwestern city Saturday, killing at least 11 people in a day of carnage across the militancy-plagued region.
An apparent U.S. missile strike annihilated a Taliban raiding party mustering to cross into Afghanistan, officials said. Pakistani troops claimed another 47 kills in their bid to retake the Swat Valley.
Violence is engulfing Pakistani territory along the Afghan border as American and allied forces crank up the pressure on al-Qaeda and Taliban militants entrenched in the forbidding and barely governed mountains and valleys.
The first of two bombs to explode in Peshawar on Saturday was hidden in a car and devastated a street busy with traffic, shoppers and worshippers heading to mosques to pray.
Television images showed vehicles burning fiercely and a stricken white- and-green bus that had been dropping handicapped children at their homes around the city.
All eight students still on board were injured, one seriously, along with the driver and an assistant, medics and police said. Four other children and seven adults were killed, and dozens more people injured, they said.
Safwat Ghayur, a senior police official, said one of several buildings badly damaged by the blast was an Internet cafe — a favorite target for violent Islamist extremists in Pakistan who consider the Web a source of moral corruption.
It was unclear whether any of the bomb victims had been in the cafe or if it was the intended target.
No group claimed responsibility for the car bomb, or a smaller explosion in the evening in a bazaar filled with women’s clothing stores that police said injured four people.
