PESHAWAR, Pakistan: A former provincial minister and seven others have died in the latest violence in Pakistan, as authorities face growing anger and criticism after a suicide strike on a volleyball match killed 101 people. Authorities rounded up dozens of suspects after Friday's volleyball attack and opened an investigation into poor medical care, while doctors in the remote northwest tried to treat casualties on hospital floors without enough medicine.
The attacker rammed a car bomb into a crowd of men, women and children watching the tournament in Shah Hasan Khan village, a pro-government area in the district of Lakki Marwat, reducing the sporting event to carnage.
Police said 101 people were killed, making it the third most deadly attack in a nearly three-year extremist campaign in the nuclear-armed Muslim country.
"An injured man died in Lakki Marwat and a girl in Bannu hospital. Both were buried this evening. The death toll with us is 101. Some 69 injured are still in hospital," district police chief Mohammad Ayub Khan said on Sunday.
Survivors searched for body parts under the rubble of around 20 collapsed homes, as mourners at the cemetery wept over freshly dug graves.
"There was nowhere in the whole district to treat the injured.... The provincial health department is responsible for all this," Mannawar Khan, a member of parliament from the district, said.
The health minister for North West Frontier Province said that only one doctor out of 10 at the hospital in Lakki Marwat had been on duty, conceding limited health care had "caused more human losses".
"After the blast, several hours passed but the other doctors didn't come. I don't know why they were missing. We have opened an inquiry and a committee has been constituted," Syed Zahir Ali Shah said.
There was chaos at the hospital in the town of Lakki Marwat, which was short of medicine and beds and overwhelmed with casualties.
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