Pakistani security officials examine the wreckage of a destroyed bus after a bomb explosion on the outskirts of Peshawar on Friday. — AFP photo

A bomb blast ripped through a Pakistani bus on Friday, killing at least 18 people, including six women and a child, on the outskirts of the north-western city of Peshawar, the police said.
More than 40 other people were wounded in the attack on a bus rented by the government to take staff home after work in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
It was the deadliest attack in months on Peshawar, which has long been a flashpoint for a local Taliban insurgency targeting government officials, security forces and ordinary civilians.
The explosion went off in the Daudzai area, killing government employees and other private passengers riding the same bus, officials said.
‘The bomb was planted under the bus,’ provincial information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain told reporters.
Police official Tahir Ayub told AFP that 18 people, including six women and a girl, were killed and more than 40 wounded.
The attack came one day after a remote-controlled bomb killed at least 15 people outside a madrassa in Pakistan’s south-western city of Quetta.
The country of 180 million sits on the frontline of the US-led war on anti-West militants since July 2007 has been gripped by a local Taliban-led insurgency, concentrated largely in the northwest.
Pakistan’s relations with the United States are in disarray and for the last six months, since US air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the border, it has imposed a blockade on NATO supplies crossing overland into Afghanistan.
On Thursday, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Pakistan that the United States was running out of patience over Islamabad’s refusal to do more to eliminate safe havens for insurgents who attack US troops fighting a 10-year war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.