A twin suicide attack targeting the Pakistani military in the city of Lahore on Friday killed up to 45 people and wounded 95, a senior police official said.

"Forty-three people were killed and 134 wounded in the attacks," Lahore civil defense department chief Mazhar Ahmad told AFP.
But a senior security official put the death toll at 45 and said six army personnel were among the dead.


The bombers walked up to Pakistani army vehicles in the densely populated R A Bazaar area, blowing themselves, a senior official said.
"There was an interval of 15 seconds between the two attacks. They were on foot. Their target was army vehicles," police official Chaudhry Mohammad Shafiq told reporters.

"The first blast was very small -- followed by sounds of gunfire. Immediately after there was a big blast hitting an army vehicle," said Mohammad Bilal who had just sat down for lunch at a nearby restaurant.

The army cordoned off the tree-lined street where there were shops and a mosque, preventing access to journalists as ambulances raced through the city of eight million to ferry the dead and wounded to hospitals.

The attacks underscored rising volatility in Lahore, where security forces have been a common target in attacks blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants.

A wave of suicide and bomb attacks across Pakistan has been waged since 2007. On Monday, a suicide car bomber destroyed security offices used to interrogate suspected militants in an upmarket Lahore neighborhood, killing 15 people in an attack claimed by Pakistan's mainstream Taliban faction.

Lahore, Pakistan's historic cultural capital, and home to many military and intelligence top brass, has been repeatedly in the militants' sights, with eight attacks killing 155 people in the city over the past year.


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