31 killed in Pakistan election violence

ISLAMABAD — A bitter election season in Pakistan concluded in more bloodshed Wednesday when a suicide bombing killed at least 31 people outside a polling station and voters nationwide cast ballots amid a heavy security presence.

Officials said that dozens were wounded in the bombing outside a school that served as a polling center in Quetta, the capital of southwestern Baluchistan province, where some 150 people were killed in a blast at a campaign rally two weeks ago. Both attacks were claimed by Islamic State.

Among the dead in Wednesday’s blast were at least four police officers, part of a deployment of 600,000 security personnel that illustrated the troubles facing Pakistan’s democracy — and was a sign of the army’s outsize role in an election that seemed certain to produce more political upheaval.

As election workers began counting ballots in a race that would determine the next prime minister, the front-runners were Imran Khan, a former playboy cricket star who has rebranded as a pious nationalist, and Shahbaz Sharif, the brother of jailed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who claims to be the victim of a political witch hunt by the army.

Candidates were vying for 270 seats in the 342-member National Assembly.

The army — which has ruled Pakistan directly or through proxy civilian governments for most of its 70 years as an independent nation — was thought by many to have tilted the playing field in Khan’s favor, perhaps setting the stage for an acrimonious post-election period.

Khan painted himself as an antidote to the corrupt rule of the Sharifs and Bhuttos, the two elite political families who have traded power in recent decades in between periods of military rule.

He has also lashed out at the U.S. for its bombing campaign in Pakistan’s tribal belt and courted Islamic extremists by endorsing anti-blasphemy laws that are used to target Pakistan’s non-Muslim religious minorities

First-time voter Muhammad Adnan, a 20-year-old student living in the capital, Islamabad, said he supported Khan’s campaign for change.

“He is against the status quo. He is against thieves and looters. He has promised to make a new Pakistan and we trust him,” Adnan said, surrounded at a polling station by friends who said they were also backing Khan.