Suicide blast kills senior Tajik cop

3 Sep 2010, 9:41 pm   -   Source: AAP
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A suicide bomber in an explosives-packed car has slammed into a police station in Tajikistan, killing a senior police official, interior ministry officials say.

A suicide bomber in an explosives-packed car slammed into a police station in Tajikistan on Friday, killing a senior police official and wounding at least 25 others, interior ministry officials said.

The car crashed into an iron gate in front of a regional police headquarters in the northern city of Khujand at high speed and exploded, killing the driver and partially demolishing the building.

A number of officers were missing, feared dead in the rubble.

The massive blast shattered windows for blocks around the station, said witnesses.

"As a result of the explosion this morning in Khujand, a senior officer in the Tajik police was killed," interior ministry spokesman Colonel Mukhammadjon Nazriyev said.

"The building was severely damaged as a result of the powerful explosion, and 25 police officers were taken to hospital with varying degrees of injuries," he added.

Nazriyev blamed the bombing on al-Qaeda-linked militant group the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, saying the attack had been an attempt to free Islamist fighters being held on murder charges in Khujand.

One doctor reached by telephone at a hospital in Khujand said that the majority of the injured were being treated for shrapnel wounds, and that some were in critical condition.

The toll from the bombing could rise as investigators continue to search the rubble of the building for the bodies of missing officers, an interior ministry official told AFP.

Residents of Khujand, a city of around 150,000 people in a mountainous area of northern Tajikistan near the volatile Fergana Valley, described panic as the explosion shook the city, shattering windows for blocks around the station.

"The explosion was very strong.... I left my home and on my way to school I dropped into a shop and the shop keeper told me that they had blown up the police department," 57-year-old Hursandoi Navruzova said by telephone.

"It's just horrible.... I immediately saw the fear on the face of everyone I met," she added.

The blast came a day after Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmon sacked his long-time security boss following a humiliating prison break last month in which a group of 25 al-Qaeda-linked militants escaped and killed six guards.

Most of them are believed to be still at large, and are likely headed for the remote Rasht Valley region near the Afghan border, where many militants were arrested last year during a government clampdown on the restive area.

The escaped militants include nationals of Afghanistan and six Russian citizens, all of them natives of the volatile North Caucasus region, where Russian authorities are battling an Islamist insurgency.

The country has been on high alert since the escape, setting up checkpoints on key roads across the mountainous Central Asian state and strengthening border positions with neighbours Afghanistan, China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Police said Thursday that a special forces operation north of the capital Dushanbe had captured the ring-leader of the prison break, Ibrokhim Nasredinov, a former inmate of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Tajikistan, where a civil war between Islamist forces and backers of Rakhmon's secular government killed tens of thousands following the collapse of the Soviet Union, shares a porous 1300km border with Afghanistan.

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