LAHORE, Pakistan – A suicide bomber rammed a car into a campaign rally in a volatile tribal region yesterday, killing 37 people and wounding 90 others, the Interior Ministry said.
The attack in Parachinar, a town in Kurram, came two days before parliamentary elections tomorrow, and was apparently intended to deter voters from participating, said Brig. Javed Cheema, a spokesman for the ministry.
“It's the same people who have been carrying out attacks, whose purpose is to create confusion and chaos and stop the polling process,” Cheema said.
The government of President Pervez Musharraf has blamed a Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who is allied with al-Qaeda, for the steep rise in suicide attacks in the past year.
It seemed unlikely, however, that yesterday's attack would have a significant effect on voter turnout because the tribal areas, which are semi-autonomous and border Afghanistan, are considered remote and lawless by most Pakistanis.
The rally at Parachinar was organized by Syed Riaz Hussain, a candidate for the national parliament who is affiliated with the Pakistan Peoples Party, the opposition party of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
The suicide bomber, driving a car filled with explosives, attacked the group on the side of the road, he said.
Kurram is known for sectarian violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, although yesterday's attack was specifically aimed at a political rally. According to one account, the people at the rally had emerged from a Shiite shrine and were on their way to the headquarters of Hussain when the bomber drove into the crowd.
The attack was the first violent incident in the immediate prelude to the election that pits the party of Musharraf, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, against two main opposition parties, the Peoples Party and the faction of the Pakistan Muslim League headed by the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Musharraf was re-elected late last year to a five-year term as president, but the parliamentary elections are viewed by many Pakistanis as a referendum on his rule, which has been marred in the last year by an increasingly aggressive insurgency of Islamic militants, the assassination of Bhutto and the imposition of emergency rule in November.
U.S. officials have repeatedly expressed concerns about whether the elections will be free and fair. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will be an election observer. He said Friday, before leaving Washington this weekend for Pakistan, that the United States should cut military aid to Pakistan if the elections were substantially rigged.
Cheema said about 80,000 soldiers had been deployed across the country to maintain order, but said the military would not be assigned to guard polling stations.
