Bombers kill 11 at Pakistan police station

The wave of attacks has created new concerns that the country’s array of militant groups, including the Taliban and Al Qaeda, are pooling resources in a coordinated attempt to bring down Pakistan’s civilian government.

The strikes have grown more sophisticated in recent months and have been carried out against even the most heavily guarded areas, including the national army headquarters in Rawalpindi on Oct 11. The attack in Peshawar, which is a favorite target for militants, appeared to have been carried out by three bombers, said Liaqat Ali Khan, the city’s police chief. He said that one attacker drove a car laden with more than 200 pounds of explosives and that the other two, a team of a man and a woman, rode in on a motorcycle.

The car detonated first, ramming into a wall of the police station, Khan said; then the pair on the motorcycle came under fire from soldiers guarding a residential compound. The female attacker was shot, but managed to get close to the station before detonating the explosives she was carrying, he said.

Female suicide bombers are rare, if not unprecedented, in Pakistan.

The officer in charge of the police station, however, said he believed that there was only one attacker, the bomber in the car, which he said rammed into a mosque at the police station. “How can a woman blow herself up when she is fired upon and hit by the soldiers?’’ asked the officer, Nisar Marwat.

Yesterday’s attack occurred a day after militants launched coordinated attacks on three law enforcement compounds in the country’s second-largest city, Lahore, killing 19 people as well as the nine attackers. Also Thursday, a car bomb in Peshawar killed a small child at a housing complex for government employees.

The police station attacked yesterday housed an investigative unit in a tightly guarded area of the city, and officials said they believed it was attacked specifically because of the role it played in fighting militancy in the region.

Peshawar is the capital of North-West Frontier Province and is surrounded on three sides by lawless tribal areas. It has been a target of militant attacks for several years, including one on Oct. 10 that killed more than 50 people at a crowded market.

Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the information minister for NorthWest Frontier Province, said three police officers were killed and 15 were wounded in yesterday’s attack.

Among the eight or more civilians killed were two women and a child, said the senior administrative official in Peshawar, Sahibzada Anees.

A man who lives near the blast site said he was on his way home when he heard the explosion.

“My house filled with smoke, and I was looking for my child, who was on her way from school,’’ he said, declining to be identified. “I saw her when the dust settled down.’’

The United States hopes that a Pakistani Army operation in South Waziristan, the Taliban’s main stronghold, will help break much of the militant network that threatens both Pakistan and US troops across the border in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani Army has given no time frame for the expected ground offensive in South Waziristan, but it has spent months softening targets there with air strikes.

Jets struck six militant positions in the region yesterday, killing 12 militants and wounding eight, a government and an intelligence official said on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media.

The two officials said they received the reports from agents in the field.

The army has reportedly already sent two divisions totaling 28,000 men and blockaded the area.

Analysts say that with winter approaching, any push would probably have to begin soon to be successful.

Material from the Associated Press was used in the compilation of this report.