Timeline of deadliest insurgent attacks in Pakistan

At least 70 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in Pakistan Thursday when a suicide bomber blew himself up among a crowd of devotees at a revered Sufi shrine in southern Sindh province. Here is a list of major attacks by militant groups in the country since 2007. 2007 October 18: Bomb attacks targeting former premier Benazir Bhutto kill 139 people in Karachi as she returns to Pakistan for the first time in eight years. Bhutto herself dies in a gun and suicide attack on December 27. 2008 August 21: Twin suicide attacks kill 64 people outside Pakistan’s main arms factory at Wah near Islamabad. September 20: Sixty people are killed when a suicide truck bomb destroys part of the five-star Marriott hotel in Islamabad. 2009 October 28: A car bomb rips apart a market in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing 125 people. December 7- 9: At least 66 people die in four attacks at a market in Lahore, Pakistan’s second biggest city. 2010 January 1: A suicide car bomb kills 101 people at a village volleyball game in the northwestern district of Bannu. May 28: Gunmen and suicide bombers storm mosques belonging to the Ahmadi religious minority in Lahore, killing 82 people. July 9: A suicide bomber kills 105 people in a busy market in the northwestern tribal district of Mohmand. September 3: A suicide attack kills 59 at a Shiite Muslim rally in Quetta. November 5: A suicide bomber kills 68 people during Friday prayers in the northwest’s Darra Adam Khel area. 2011 April 3: Fifty die after two suicide bombers attack a Sufi shrine in the central town of Dera Ghazi Khan. May 13: Two suicide bombers kill at least 98 people outside a police training centre in Charsadda. 2013 January 10: A double suicide attack on a snooker club kills 92 in a district of Quetta populated by Shiite Hazaras. February 16: A bomb at a market in Hazara Town, a Shiite neighbourhood near Quetta, kills 89. March 3: A car bomb explodes in a Shiite neighbourhood in Karachi, killing 45. September 22: Eighty-two people die when two suicide bombers attack a church in Peshawar after a Sunday service. 2014 November 2: Fifty-five people are killed by a suicide bomber at the main PakistanIndia border crossing. December 16: Taliban insurgents storm an army-run school in Peshawar, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. 2015 January 30: Sixty- one people are killed as a suicide bomber hits a Shiite mosque in Shikarpur in southern Pakistan. May 13: The first attack officially claimed by the Islamic State group in Pakistan kills 45 Shiite Muslims in Karachi. 2016 March 27: Seventy-five people are killed and hundreds injured in an explosion that targets Christians near a park in Lahore. August 8: At least 73 people die and dozens are wounded when a blast tears through mourners at a hospital in Quetta. October 25: A brutal gun and suicide bomb assault on a police academy in southwestern Balochistan kills 61 people, the deadliest strike on a security installation in the country’s history, jointly claimed by the Islamic State group and Lashkar- eJhangvi. November 12: At least 52 pilgrims are killed, including many women and children, at a shrine in Balochistan. 2017 February 16: At least 70 people are killed when a bomb claimed by IS rips through a Sufi shrine in Sindh province, wounding more than 200. The attack comes after a series of bloody extremist assaults in less than a week, most claimed by the Pakistani Taliban. — AFP