18 killed on Independence Day: officials

QUETTA: Bomb, gun and rocket attacks killed 18 people in flashpoints bordering Afghanistan on Sunday as the country celebrated Independence Day, officials said.

Fourteen civilians were killed and 16 wounded when a bomb ripped through a roadside restaurant in the town of Dera Allah Yar, part of the southwestern province of Balochistan, police said.

After most of those trapped under debris from a collapsed roof were recovered, district police chief Javed Gharshin told AFP that 14 people had been killed and 16 others wounded.

Gharshin said four suspects had been arrested in connection with the bombing.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

Elsewhere in the province, gunmen on motorcycles shot dead a local journalist in the town of Khuzdar, police said.

"Gunmen on a motorbike shot dead journalist Munir Noor when he was returning to home after shopping at a nearby market," local police station chief Abdul Qadir Sheikh told AFP from the area, some 155 miles south of Quetta.

Noor was a correspondent of the private Online news agency.

In northwestern tribal belt, at least three paramilitary soldiers were killed and 25 wounded when militants fired a rocket into their camp as they prepared for an Independence Day assembly.

"The condition of five of the wounded soldiers was serious."

Local intelligence officials confirmed the attack and the death toll.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011