Lahore Blast: several killed and injured....

Senior police officers among at least 13 people killed and dozens wounded during pharmacists’ protest at provincial assembly.Two senior police officers were among those killed by a suspected suicide bomb attack in the Pakistani city of Lahore. The blast on Monday ripped through a crowd of people who had gathered for a protest by chemists and pharmaceutical manufacturers outside the provincial assembly on Mall Road, Lahore’s grand Raj-era thoroughfare. Mushtaq Sukhera, inspector general of police in Punjab province, said at least 13 people had been killed and 83 wounded. The victims included five police officers, two of them, Zahid Gondal and Ahmad Mobin, senior police figures in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest and most influential province.Mobin, a deputy inspector general of police, had been on Mall Road to urge the manufacturers to end their protest. Some eyewitnesses told local media they saw a man on a motorbike cause an explosion in the middle of the crowd. The force was such that a nearby television news van was almost entirely destroyed.“Apparently it was a suicide blast, but police are still investigating to know the exact nature,” a Punjab police spokesman, Nayab Haider, told Reuters.A spokesman for Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack. Previous attacks have attracted multiple claims of responsibility from rival groups and it was impossible to immediately verify the claim. Security forces, including large contingents of soldiers, cordoned off the blast area.Officials in the city had been braced for an incident after the National Counter Terrorism Authority issued a warning on 7 February that “an unidentified terrorist group has planned a terrorist attack in Lahore”. It urged “extreme vigilance and heightened security measures”.But Rana Sanaullah, the provincial law minister, said it had been impossible to protect the crowd of protesters gathered on an open street. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar also claimed responsibility for an Easter Day bombing in Lahore last year that killed more than 70 people in a public park.