Bomb strike as Hillary Clinton arrives in Pakistan

A bombing in the Pakistani city of Peshawar has claimed the lives of dozens of people, many of them women and children, as the US secretary of state, Hillary ClintonHillary Clinton, arrived for a three-day visit to the city.

The explosion ripped through a crowded bazaar in the old city, filling the narrow streets with burning debris and smoke and trapping dozens of people under twisted wreckage and charred roof beams.

Iftikhar Hussain, a spokesman for the provincial government, said 80 people had been killed and 200 injured in the blast.

A senior government official in the city, Azam KhanAzam Khan, told Reuters. "It was a car bomb. The car was parked outside a market frequented mostly by women," he said.

Live television coverage showed rescuers scrambling to pull survivors from the rubble, many crying for help. A three-storey building collapsed into a narrow street, kicking up a large cloud of brown smoke and debris.

Men in white prayer caps ferried the dead and injured on makeshift stretchers. Women scrambled to safely through alleyways filled with smoke. Businesses across the city closed immediately.

Television stations, quoting hospital officials, said more than 50 people had been killed and more than 100 injured, with the death toll expected to rise.

There was no immediate speculation of responsibility but the most likely culprits were Taliban militants resisting a giant army operation against their South Waziristan stronghold.

Over the past three weeks more than 250 people have been killed in a series of bombings, gun attacks and targeted assassinations in Islamabad, Peshawar and Lahore. The army says another 200 people, mostly militants, have been killed in heavy fighting in the mountains of South Waziristan.

The Peshawar bomb went off as Clinton arrived in Islamabad, a two-hour drive away. She praised Pakistan for leading the fight against extremists. "I give the government and military high marks for taking them on," she said. "That wasn't what they were doing before."

American efforts to aid Pakistan have been fraught with controversy. This month the Pakistani military raised vocal objections to a $7.5bn (£4.6bn) package that it described as a tool of interference in the country's affairs.