ISLAMABAD,
Pakistan — At least 16 people were killed on Wednesday in a suicide
bombing outside a polio vaccination center in the southwestern Pakistani
city of Quetta, officials and witnesses said.
Thirteen
of the victims were police officers, said Syed Imtiaz Shah, a senior
official with the Quetta police. He said the officers were there to
guard polio workers, who are often targeted by Islamist militants in
Pakistan.
The
attack came on the third day of a vaccination campaign in the province
of Baluchistan, of which Quetta is the capital. The bomber, who was also
killed, walked up to police officers and detonated what Mr. Shah said
amounted to more than 20 pounds of explosives.
A
spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Muhammad Khurrasani, claimed
responsibility for the attack on the militants’ behalf. Two civilians
and a paramilitary police officer were also killed, and 10 police
officers and nine civilians were wounded.
Hard-line
Islamists in Pakistan have long opposed polio vaccination campaigns,
saying that polio workers are Western spies and that such campaigns are
part of a conspiracy to leave Muslims infertile. Resistance to such
campaigns increased after 2011, when it emerged that the C.I.A. had used
a vaccination drive as cover in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Baluchistan,
a restive province that borders Afghanistan and Iran, has been racked
by separatist and sectarian violence for years. “Such a cowardly act
could not deter our resolve of eliminating terrorism from the region,”
the province’s home minister, Sarfraz Bugti, said by telephone,
referring to the attack.