Bomb Kills Seven after Pakistan Ministers' Meeting

A bomb killed at least seven people and wounded another 22 on Monday, targeting a public meeting attended by provincial ministers in volatile northwestern Pakistan, police said.

The bomb went off soon after chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Amir Haider Hoti, and other ministers in his provincial cabinet had left the meeting in the town of Nowshera.

It was the third bomb in five days to hit the northwest, which in recent months had seen a decline in violence linked to a local Taliban insurgency directed against a government allied to the US-led war against terror.

"The bomb was planted on a motorbike and the target was the meeting," local police Chief Mohammed Hussain said.

The secular Awami National Party, which leads the provincial government, had called the meeting, attended by its senior members.

"The bomb carried about three to four kilograms of explosives, it was detonated using a remote-controlled device," Hussain told Agence France Presse.

The bomb was attached near the fuel tank of the motorcycle, parked about 150 meters from the venue of the meeting, he said.

"At least seven people were killed and 22 others were wounded," Hussain said, raising an earlier death toll of five.

Doctor Rahim Jan at Peshawar's main state-run Lady Reading hospital said they received nine of the wounded people and two of them passed away.

On Friday, three suicide bombers blew themselves up at a police station in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing four officers a day after a car bombing killed 13 people at a bus station on the outskirts of Peshawar.

More than 530 bomb attacks have killed around 4,900 people across Pakistan since government troops in July 2007 stormed a mosque in Islamabad where Islamist extremists were holed up, provoking a local Taliban-led insurgency.