Pakistan Police Defuse Passenger Train Bomb - Naharnet

Pakistani police defused a bomb on a passenger train in the country's northwest on Wednesday, officials said, hours after a blast at a station in the eastern city of Lahore killed two people.

A guard found the bomb in a briefcase in the early hours of the morning on the train from Karachi to Peshawar, the main town in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, near the Afghan border.

"The bomb fitted with detonator and batteries was packed with old clothes in a briefcase lying unattended in one of the coaches of the Awam Express," police officer Mazhar Abbas told Agence France Presse.

The train guard found the briefcase after a wedding party got down from the train at Attock station, he said.

"The guard checked from the wedding party members and remaining passengers in the coach but nobody claimed its ownership."

A bomb disposal squad was then summoned who defused the device, he said.

Mohammed Sajjad, a police investigation official, told AFP the bomb carried 13 kilograms of explosives as well as ball bearings and some nuts and bolts.

"Luckily a major tragedy has been averted," he added.

At least two people were killed on Tuesday when a bomb exploded near the waiting lounge of a luxury train at the main railway station in Lahore.

Pakistan suffers frequent attacks blamed on Taliban and al-Qaida-linked militants, who are most active in the lawless tribal belt in the northwest of the country on the border with Afghanistan.

Islamist militants have killed more than 4,900 people across Pakistan since government troops raided an extremist mosque in Islamabad in July 2007.

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