'Flying Coach' bomb kills 60 in Punjab

Up to 60 passengers died and 28 others were badly burnt when a bomb hidden in a Pakistani bus exploded yesterday.

The "Flying Coach", crammed with people leaving the Pakistani city of Lahore to pass the Muslim festival of Eid in their native Punjab villages, was speeding through a dusty crossroads, horn blaring, when the blast ignited the fuel tank, and the bus burst into a fireball.

Nobody claimed responsibility for the explosion, but in Pakistan the bombers seldom do.

Pakistan's central region of Punjab has been rocked by a series of explosions within the past 15 days, but none as deadly as the one on the "Flying Coach".

From her village of Larkhana, the Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto condemned the blast as "a dastardly act". In a statement she said: "The fact that terrorists chose the auspicious occasion of Eid al-Adha for committing a heinous act showed they had no respect for even the most pious day of Islam." She added: "The government will not compromise with terrorists and will fight them till the last of them is brought to book."

The intensity of the explosion reduced the bodies to skeletons, said police, making identification of victims almost impossible. Police said they had no evidence yet as to who the bombers might be. Experts are investigating possible links between the bus bombing and the other explosions in Punjab.

Earlier, Ms Bhutto claimed police had been tipped off that an unidentified group of terrorists was planning to "de-stabilise the Punjab", one of Pakistan's more peaceful regions. The first explosion hit Lahore two weeks ago; a bomb blew up in the waiting room of cricketer Imran Khan's cancer hospital, killing six people - all of them cancer patients and their relatives - and causing nationwide shock and revulsion.

Mr Khan alleged that the blast was set off to scare him into giving up his political ambitions. If so, the bombers failed. On Friday he formed a new "Justice Movement" whose aim, he said, was to clean up Pakistan's politics.

Soon after, an explosion in a crowded cinema hall in the Punjabi town of Sergodha, injured 12 people. That was followed by blasts in a hotel and a police station, all in central Punjab. A small device was also left outside the gate at the American cultural centre in Lahore, causing slight damage.

Pakistan, in the past, has accused neighbouring India of instigating terrorist acts in retaliation against Islamabad's continued support of Muslim separatist militants in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. When anything goes wrong in one country, each blames the "foreign hand" of the other.

Across the border in India, a similar bomb exploded on election day, killing 11 passengers on a bus travelling from Delhi into Uttar Pradesh state. No organisation has claimed responsibility.

When bombs or assassinations have occurred in the past in Pakistan, Ms Bhutto has also blamed the Mohajir Quami Movement (MQM), a Karachi-based extremist organisation which is fighting for the rights of millions of Indian Muslims who settled in southern Pakistan after the 1947 partition with India. In Karachi, this ethnic strife has claimed hundreds of victims so far this year, and human rights activists have accused both the MQM and the state police of resorting to widespread torture and killing.

In Punjab, rival Sunni and Shia extremist groups have attacked each other's mosques and clergymen. But as one Lahore journalist commented: "These sectarian extremists only go for each other - they've never done anything like put a bomb on a bus."

Fall-out from the civil war in neighbouring Afghanistan has also spilled over into Pakistan: an Afghan was suspected of exploding a car bomb last December in the frontier town of Peshawar, killing 43 people, and an Egyptian militant is thought to have blown up the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad last November, killing 16.

In Lahore, police are on alert after receiving information that the unknown bomber's next target might be a high government official.