Eight suspected insurgents have been killed by explosives intended for a bomb attack that accidentally blew up, destroying a militant safe house in Pakistan's financial capital Karachi, police said.
Guns, grenades and suicide vests have been recovered from the house in a poor Karachi neighbourhood, which officials said has been a den for Islamist insurgents involved in the escalating campaign of violence in the nuclear-armed nation.
Karachi police chief Waseem Ahmad said on Friday early intelligence suggested the militant cell had been planning to attack a court in the city, possibly when Interior Minister Rehman Malik was due to appear.
In other incidents in Pakistan's northwest, five militants were killed in Khyber district by a suicide bomber from a rival Islamist militia, two people died in a bombing in Bajaur, and a US missile strike killed five insurgents.
Militant attacks have intensified as Pakistan's armed forces, with vocal support from Washington, push into northwestern Taliban strongholds.
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Fayyaz Khan, a senior police official in the southern port city of Karachi, said eight bodies had been pulled from the rubble of the flattened house.
"So far, evidence on the ground shows the occupants of this house were trying to shift explosives and weapons when the blast occurred," he said.
Ahmad told reporters that 25 hand grenades, three Kalashnikov rifles, ammunition and two suicide jackets were recovered from the rubble.
"We have the information that these terrorists wanted to attack a court and the interior minister was also scheduled to appear in the court, and it is possible that these people were trying to attack that court," he said.
Malik, who appeared in a Karachi court over a 15-year-old abuse of power case on Friday, said he had been warned about possible threats to his security.
"Today Karachi was saved from large devastation," Malik told reporters.
"The people who failed in Swat, South Waziristan and FATA are now trying to bring destruction in Karachi," he said, referring to northwestern areas, where the military is engaged in operations to eliminate Taliban strongholds.
Suicide bombings and attacks by Islamist militants have intensified in recent months as the military pursues its assaults, and in Karachi last month a bomb ripped through a Shi'ite Muslim procession killing 43 people.
In Khyber tribal district on Friday, five people were killed and 12 wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the offices of a rival militant group, local administration chief Shafeerullah Khan told AFP.
In Bajaur district in the north of the tribal belt, meanwhile, an anti-Taliban leader and another man were killed by a planted bomb, local administration official Ghulam Saidullah said.
More than 2,900 people have been killed in Pakistan since July 2007 in attacks by militants who oppose Islamabad's alliance with the United States in the eight-year war against the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Washington has praised Pakistan's action against the Taliban but is urging the country to also crack down on militants who hide out in the lawless northwest and cross the border to attack NATO and US troops in Afghanistan.
The two nations are also at odds over increasing missile strikes by unmanned US aircraft targeting militants in Pakistan's northwest.
On Friday, two missiles fired from a drone hit a house in North Waziristan tribal district.
"The house was completely destroyed... Five militants were killed and three were injured in the attack," a senior security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The attacks on Pakistani territory fuel anti-American sentiment in the nuclear-armed Muslim nation and the government publicly condemns the strikes.
Speaking during a visit to Islamabad on Friday, US Republican Senator John McCain defended the attacks.
"We will continue to try to find common ground with the Pakistani government as we have to do everything we can... to protect Americans from the attacks of terrorists who may be based here and operate out of Pakistan," he said.
