Suicide blast kills 8 in northwest Pakistan

Eight people were killed and 26 injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a hotel in a Shiite minority neighbourhood in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar on Tuesday, officials said. "Eight people were killed and twenty six have been injured in a suicide blast outside a local hotel yards away from an Imambargah (worship place of the Shiites)," senior police official Faisal Mukhtar told AFP. Shafqat Malik, chief of Peshawar's Bomb Disposal Unit, confirmed that it was a suicide blast. Jamil Shah, a spokesman for the city's government-run Leady Reading Hospital confirmed the casualties. "Eight dead bodies have been brought to the hospital along with 26 injured," he said. An AFP correspondent present at the scene said police had cordoned off the area and rescue workers were moving the injured to hospital. "There is complete darkness and we cannot see anything except ambulance lights," the AFP correspondent said. The Pakistani Taliban, which has carried out a bloody campaign against the state, distanced itself from the blast. "We have no role in the blast and it was not carried out by the Pakistani Taliban," Shahid Ullah Shahid, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban told AFP.