Bomb kills 8 in Swat

A suicide car bomber targeting an army convoy killed at least eight people in Pakistan's Swat district yesterday, just months after the military claimed to have quelled a Taliban insurgency.
The bomber blew up a vehicle packed with explosives as security forces drove through Mingora, the main town of Swat where the military has sought to reassert control after putting down the Islamist uprising.
Shops and cars were damaged in what was the deadliest attack in the former tourist district once frequented by Westerners since a suicide bomber flung himself at a military convoy killing 45 people on October 12 in Shangla.
Local television footage showed a car enveloped in flames and black smoke billowing down a street, as casualties lay on the ground in blood-soaked clothing. Soldiers rushed to the scene and ambulances ferried away the wounded.
Frightened women and children could be seen scurrying from the scene.
"Eight people have been killed and 19 injured. It was a car bomb blast," Qazi Ghulam Farooq, Mingora police chief, told AFP by telephone.
Mohammad Idrees Khan, senior Swat police official, confirmed the death toll.
"It was a suicide car bomb.... The target was an army convoy," Major Mushtaq Ahmad Khan from the Swat Media Centre told AFP.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani condemned the bombing.
"Such inhuman acts of terrorism would not be able to shatter the determination of the people of Pakistan and the people of Swat... to curb this menace and fight the insane extremists," a statement from his office said.
Swat has been held up as a success story in Pakistan's fight against Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked militants by local and US officials, who praised the offensive for apparently ending a two-year local Taliban insurgency.
Earlier Police in northwest Pakistan arrested Mulvi Kabir, one of the top 10 most wanted Taliban leaders and a former Taliban governor of Afghanistan's Nangahar Province, Fox News reported on its website Sunday.
The network, citing two unnamed senior US officials, said that Pakistani police captured Kabir in the Naw Shera district of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province.
The capture is a "significant detention," a senior US military official in Afghanistan told Fox.
Information leading to Kabir's capture was obtained from Mullah Baradar, the Taliban's second in command, whose arrest was announced on February 18 following a joint US-Pakistani operation, according to Fox.