A huge car bomb ripped through a crowded market in Pakistan on Wednesday killing 92 people and underscoring the gravity of the extremist threat destabilising the nuclear-armed Muslim state.
The explosion brought down buildings in the northwestern city of Peshawar just hours after US Secretary Hillary Clinton arrived in Pakistan to bolster the two countries' troubled alliance against Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants.
Doctors at the Lady Reading Hospital said many of the casualties were women and children, as a routine day out in the city's main bazaar ended in horror and eclipsed Clinton's first visit as secretary of state to Pakistan.
"We have 92 dead bodies and 217 injured people. Nineteen of the dead are women and 11 are children. All the dead are civilians," Doctor Zafar Iqbal told AFP as staff declared an emergency and called for blood donations.
Peshawar is home to 2.5 million people and a gateway to the tribal badlands where the military is pressing a massive offensive against the Taliban in its toughest battle yet against a well-trained enemy on forbidding terrain.
Clinton, unveiling a 215 million-dollar energy investment and trying to fend off fierce Pakistani criticism of US policies, expressed solidarity after one of the country's deadliest attacks and called for a new partnership. Major attacks in Pakistan
"This is our struggle as well," said Clinton, condemning the "tenacious and brutal extremist groups who kill innocent people and terrorise communities".
"We will give you the help that you need," Clinton told a joint news conference with Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who insisted the country was unswerving in its fight against those responsible.
"People who are carrying out such heinous crimes want to shake our resolve. We will not buckle, we will fight you. We will fight you because we want stability and peace in Pakistan," he added.
Flames reached out of burning wreckage and smoke billowed over the collapsed rubble of a mosque and three buildings, where rescue workers picked charred bodies out of smouldering debris and gathered human flesh in plastic bags.
"It was a car bomb. Some people are still trapped," bomb disposal official Shafqat Malik told reporters as the death toll rose into the early evening.
Appalled hospital staff gave harrowing accounts of the dead and wounded piling up in hospital corridors.
"There are body parts. There are people. There are burnt people. There are dead bodies. There are wounded," said Doctor Muslim Khan. Eyewitnesses tell of living hell
The attack overshadowed the arrival of Clinton, the most senior US official to visit since US President Barack Obama put Pakistan at the heart of the fight against Al-Qaeda and made the war in neighbouring Afghanistan a top priority.
"This is a critical moment and the United States seeks to turn the page to a new partnership, with not only the government but the people of a democratic Pakistan," she said in her first public appearance in Islamabad.
The United States has welcomed the assault being pressed by about 30,000 Pakistani troops against homegrown Taliban in South Waziristan, part of the tribal belt where US officials say Al-Qaeda is plotting attacks on the West.
The military insisted rebels were on the defensive and that troops were making steady gains in South Waziristan, claiming to have killed another 25 militants and that troops were massed round a key Taliban hub.
But a rising number of audacious attacks has shown Al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked extremists can target anywhere in Pakistan, in a furious backlash against the government's decision to side with the US-led "war on terror".
The United States, which is losing record numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan, relies on Pakistan for regional stability and to fight militants.
Pakistan, whose cash-strapped government presides over a battered economy, relies on US cash and weapons to fight against militants who have killed more than 2,370 people in a deadly web of bombings since July 2007.
The United States is keen to bolster the civilian government, whose relations with the powerful military have been fraught, signing into law a 7.5 billion-dollar non-military aid package that has been criticised by the army.
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