A car bomb killed three people in Pakistan’s eastern megacity Lahore yesterday an attack officials believe targeted police and security forces near the home of a banned firebrand Muslim cleric.
A provincial police chief Inam Ghani in a statement said; ‘Our assessment is that the most obvious target was the police and security forces,’
He said the blast site — in the affluent neighborhood of Johar Town — was near the home of Hafiz Saeed, the alleged mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
“The vehicle might have succeeded in reaching there had this police checkpoint not been present,” Ghani said.
A police official who did not want to be named said the checkpoint was in place to guard Saeed’s house.
The cleric was head of the now-banned militant organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), accused by India and the United States of plotting the four-day assault in Mumbai that left 166 people dead.
Delhi has long seethed at Pakistan’s failure to hand over or prosecute those accused of organising the attacks.
Saeed was jailed in 2020 on separate terror charges.
Africa Today News, New York gathered that three people were killed and 25 wounded in Wednesday’s attack.
It was unclear whether the car was packed with explosives that were remotely detonated, or if a suicide bomber was behind the blast.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK