ISLAMABAD: On PakistanÂ’s 64th Independence Day on Sunday, 18 people were killed in bomb, gun and rocket attacks. A bomb attached to a timer ripped through a two-story hotel in Pakistan's southwestern Dera Allah Yar town of Balochistan province Sunday, reducing the building to rubble and killing 14 people, police said.| Ah, fireworks on independence day, a real tradition... |
Police have taken two people into custody who had tea in the hotel's restaurant and left just before the bomb went off, he said.
Elsewhere in the province, gunmen on motorcycles shot dead a local journalist in the town of Khuzdar, police said.
"Gunmen on a motorbike shot dead journalist Munir Noor when he was returning to home after shopping at a nearby market," local police chief Abdul Qadir Sheikh said from the area.
In northwestern tribal belt, at least three paramilitary soldiers were killed and 25 wounded when militants fired a rocket into their camp as they prepared for an Independence Day assembly.