Twin blasts rocked Lahore on Friday, hitting a high-security military district and killing at least 39 people.
Unconfirmed reports put the death toll at up to 50, while more than 95 people were injured.
The attacks, close to each other, struck a busy market inside the Lahore cantonment, home of the local army garrison. The suicide attackers appeared to target passing army vehicles, with six soldiers reportedly among the dead.
The bombers struck at 1pm, around the time of Friday prayers.
“There were about 10 to 15 seconds between the blasts. Both were suicide attacks,” a senior local government official, Sajjad Bhutta, said at the site.
“The maximum preventative measure were being taken, but these people find support from somewhere.”
The market, where shops were ripped apart, was near a bus stop and a mosque. People waiting for buses and children crossing the road were among the victims.
Witnesses said that bodies, some with missing limbs, were scattered across the area.
“They [the bombers] were both on foot. We have found the heads of both of them,” said Tariq Saleem Dogar, the top police official for Punjab province. Bombers wearing suicide vests typically have their heads blown off by the force of the blast.
It was the second bombing this week in Lahore, the bustling cultural hub of Pakistan which had enjoyed a period of relative peace in recent months. Lahore is the capital of the eastern Punjab province, Pakistan’s heartland and its most densely populated area.
It had been hoped that on-going Pakistani military operations against Taliban extremists in the north-west of the country, close to Afghanistan, in the Swat valley and the tribal area, would cripple their ability to carry out terrorist attacks.
‘Trying to make Pakistan a failed state’
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the car bombing on Monday of a police interrogation building in Lahore, which killed 14 people.
Separately, a US Christian aid agency’s office was hit by a gun and grenade attack this week, killing six of its staff, all Pakistanis, in north-west Pakistan.
“They are trying everything to make Pakistan a failed state. We saw what they tried in Swat, now they have come to the mainstream,” the interior minister, Rehman Malik, said in Islamabad. “Terrorists want to destabilise Punjab. I warn them that they can’t fight with the state.”
Last year Lahore was dragged into the bloody insurgency in Pakistan, which claimed about 3 000 lives during 2009, with a gun assault on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team among other attacks in the city. – guardian.co.uk