(AFP) – A government official in northwest Pakistan died on Tuesday from injuries sustained when suicide bombers struck his office during a meeting to discuss looming general elections, officials said.
Khalid Mumtaz Kundi, a deputy of Mutahir Zeb, the government’s representative in the semi-autonomous tribal district of Khyber, which straddles the key NATO supply line into Afghanistan, died in a military hospital in Peshawar.
“They operated on him for several hours overnight but several pieces of shrapnel had entered his body and he died,” a security official told AFP.
Officials in the Khyber administration confirmed his death.
Six people have now died as a result of the attack, in which two suicide bombers stormed the Khyber administration’s compound in Peshawar as Zeb chaired a meeting on arrangements for the elections.
There has been no claim of responsibility.
The military has long been fighting Taliban and other Islamist insurgents in Khyber, which straddles a key NATO supply route into Afghanistan, where US-led combat troops are due to leave next year.
Violence has increased in northwest Pakistan ahead of elections, which are due by mid-May and which will mark the first time an elected civilian government completes a full term in office.
