A trio of suicide attackers, including a rare female bomber, set off two blasts outside a police station in a northwestern Pakistani city Friday, killing 13 people in the latest bloodshed in an unrelenting wave of terror plaguing the country. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing in Peshawar city, but suspicion fell on the Taleban, who have been blamed for two weeks of attacks that have killed more than 150 people across the country. The violence appears aimed at forcing the government to abandon a planned offensive into the militants' stronghold in South Waziristan along the Afghan border. The Friday afternoon attack targeted a heavily fortified police station next to a mosque in the main city in Pakistan's Taleban-riddled North West Frontier Province. A car filled with explosives drove to the main gate of the police station as a motorcycle carrying a man and a woman pulled up behind it, Peshawar police chief Liaquat Ali Khan said. The woman jumped off and ran toward a nearby housing complex where army officers live, while the man smashed the motorcycle into the car, which exploded into a huge fireball, he said. Police shot at the woman, who detonated explosives she was wearing. The impact of the blast destroyed part of the police station and the mosque next to it, he said. “Police tried to intercept a woman sitting on a motorcycle with a terrorist. She blew herself up and after that there was another blast when a suicide attacker sitting in a car exploded,” said Khan. “If that woman suicide bomber had not been killed, she might have caused more damage,” he added. Television footage showed the upper part of the wall of the brick mosque shorn off. Security forces swarmed the area as ambulances arrived at the scene. A twisted chunk of metal on the ground was in flames, and a small white car's front section was destroyed. In nearby Lady Reading Hospital, rescue workers rushed wounded victims through the hallways on stretchers. The blast killed 13 people, including three police officers, two women and two children, Khan said. Another 15 people were wounded, including a criminal suspect who was detained inside the police station at the time of the attack, officials said.
