QUETTA, Pakistan — A bomb attached to a timer ripped through a two-story hotel Sunday in southwestern Pakistan, reducing the building to rubble and killing 12 people, police said.
The attack in Dera Allah Yar in Baluchistan province also wounded 23 people, said Jawed Iqbal Gharshin, police chief in surrounding Jafferabad district. Police have taken two people into custody who had tea in the hotel’s restaurant and left just before the bomb went off, he said.
No group claimed responsibility for the attack. But Baluchistan has experienced a decades-long insurgency by nationalists who want a greater share of the region’s natural resources. The province, next to Afghanistan, is thought to be home to many Taliban militants.
Elsewhere in Baluchistan, two gunmen riding a motorcycle killed local journalist Munir Shakir in Khuzdar, said Qadir Shaikh, the local police chief.
Also on Sunday, suspected militants fired rockets at a paramilitary base in northwestern Pakistan during an independence day ceremony, killing three soldiers and wounding 23 others, intelligence officials said.
Soldiers had finished raising the Pakistani flag and were gathering for speeches when the rockets hit the base in Miran Shah, the main town in the North Waziristan tribal area, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
North Waziristan is the main sanctuary for Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal region along the Afghan border.
The U.S. has demanded that Pakistan launch an offensive against the militants in North Waziristan, but the government says its forces are stretched too thin by operations in other parts of the tribal area.
Many analysts think Pakistan is reluctant to target Afghan Taliban militants with whom it has historic ties and who could be useful allies in Afghanistan after foreign troops withdraw.
