Pakistan volleyball blast kills 88 – police

ISLAMABAD, (Reuters) – A suicide bomber blew himself  up in an SUV at a volleyball game in northwest Pakistan today, killing 88 people in a village that opposes al  Qaeda-linked Taliban insurgents, police said.
The bomber struck as young men played volleyball in front  of a crowd of spectators, including elderly residents and  children, near the town of Lakki Marwat, officials said.
The bloodshed will put President Asif Ali Zardari’s efforts  to fight the Taliban under greater scrutiny, pressure he does  not need at a time when corruption cases against his allies  could be revived.
“It’s just a disaster. I can see flesh, bodies and wounded  all around,” Fazl-e-Akbar, a witness, told Reuters by telephone.  “It’s dark. Vehicles’ headlights are being used to search for  victims.”
Local police chief Ayub Khan said the bomber blew himself up  in his sport utility vehicle in the middle of the field. A  second vehicle was believed to have fled the scene.
“We have removed all bodies and wounded from the rubble,”  Khan said, adding that 88 people were killed.
It was one of the bloodiest bombings in U.S. ally Pakistan  since the October 2007 attack that killed at least 139 people  when former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Zardari’s wife,  returned home from self-imposed exile.
An attack on a sporting event is highly unusual, but could  be part of the militants’ strategy of bombing crowded areas such  as markets to inflict mass casualties and spread fear and chaos.
Police said the village had formed an armed anti-Taliban  militia, a phenomenon that started in Pakistan last year.
Despite major military offensives against their strongholds,  the Taliban have killed hundreds of people in bombings.
Britain’s Foreign Office described the attack as horrific  and said it underlined the urgent need to fight extremism.
“It is a threat that the international community must help  Pakistan to tackle, in the interests both of Pakistan’s people  and of wider stability,” it said in a statement.
In a sign of growing security fears, the United Nations will  withdraw some of its staff from Pakistan because of safety  concerns, a U.N. spokeswoman said on Thursday.
“We have got to be on the offensive and launch precise  strikes on (militant) training centres and hideouts. They’re  losing the battle. Nobody in our society supports them,” North  West Frontier Province’s information minister, Mian Iftikhar  Hussain, told Reuters.
Violence has intensified since July 2007 when the army  cleared militants from a radical mosque in Islamabad.
Zardari’s options are limited. Security policies are set by  Pakistan’s all-powerful military, which nurtured militants in  the 1980s to fight Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan.
Washington wants Pakistan to root out militants who cross  into Afghanistan to attack U.S.- and NATO-led troops. But doing  so would require strategic sacrifices. Pakistan sees them as  leverage against arch-enemy India in Afghanistan.
Washington, frustrated by what it says are inadequate  efforts to wipe out the militants, has stepped up pilotless U.S.  drone aircraft attacks on Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in  Pakistan.
While the strikes killed high-profile figures, they have  also generated anti-American anger, making it difficult for  Zardari to accommodate his U.S. supporters.
The latest attack came on a day of strikes in the southern  city of Karachi, the country’s biggest and its commercial  capital, to denounce violence gripping the nuclear-armed nation.
The strikes were called by religious and political leaders  after a suicide bomber killed 43 people at a religious  procession on Monday. The Taliban claimed responsibility and  threatened more violence.
“They are hired assassins. They are enemies of Pakistan.  They are enemies of Islam,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told  reporters on a trip to Karachi to show support for residents.
Security forces carried out patrols. But residents were  taking no chances.
“We are already losing business and can’t take the risk of  going out today and opening our shops,” said Saleem Ahmed, who  sells electronics at one of the city’s markets.