Four killed, 28 wounded in attacks

Four people, including two children, were killed and 28 wounded Saturday in a bomb blast and a militant attack on Pakistani troops, security officials said. The children and one civilian were killed by a remote-control motorcycle bomb targeting security forces in Punjgur district of Balochistan. "Three people including two children were killed and 26 people were injured, the target was a paramilitary convoy," a senior security official told AFP.
Five soldiers were among the wounded, officials said. An official of the paramilitary Frontier Corps confirmed the incident. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. The second incident occurred in the lawless north-west tribal district of South Waziristan, where a group of militants attacked a security checkpost in Ladha town, triggering a gunfight which killed one soldier and wounded two others.
"One soldier was killed and two were injured in the attack, three militants were also killed in the retaliatory fire," a security official in Peshawar, the main city in the north-west, told AFP. Once notorious as a bastion of Pakistani Taliban and Uzbek fighters, Ladha was reduced to a shell of damaged buildings, piles of rubble and a ruined paramilitary fort after the military launched an operation in 2009.