The
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the
attack near the city of Quetta, the provincial capital of
Balochistan, in a statement received by Reuters.
Separately, the army said it killed 10 militants in Balochistan
on Tuesday, but did not clarify whether they were TTP or Baloch
separatist fighters.
Police official Azfar Mehsar told reporters that the bomber
rammed his vehicle into the police truck, detonating the
explosives and forcing the police truck to plunge into a ravine.
The suicide bomber's victims included a policeman, a woman and a
child, and some of the wounded were in a critical condition,
another police official, Abdul Haq, told Reuters.
One of the wounded men died at the hospital, said an official,
Wasim Baig, adding that 15 police officers were among the
wounded.
Islamist militants in Pakistan often target polio vaccination
teams, having spread rumours that the immunisation effort is a
Western tool to spy on them and make Muslims infertile.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack and vowed to
press on with the vaccination campaign.
Although Pakistan kept relations with the Afghan Taliban during
the long insurgency to drive western forces out of Afghanistan,
it has been fighting the TTP in its own borders for years, even
though the outfit has ties to the Afghan Taliban.
The TTP wants to overthrow Pakistan's government to replace it
with a governance system that subscribes to their own harsh
interpretation of Islamic laws.
The Pakistan army has conducted several operations against the
militants in their strongholds in lawless districts along Afghan
border in recent months.
(Reporting by Gul Yousafzai in Quetta and Saud Mahsud in Dera
Ismail Khan; Additional Reporting by Jibran Ahmad in Peshawar;
Writing by Asif Shahzad in Islamabad; Editing by Clarence
Fernandez, Simon Cameron-Moore and Arun Koyyur)
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