A suspected suicide bomber set off an explosion today at an office of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, killing three people and wounding several, police said.
Pakistan is battling Islamist militants who have set off numerous bombs in towns and cities aimed at the security forces as well as government and foreign targets.
"Three people were killed, including two women," senior city police official Tahir Alam told reporters outside the tightly guarded WFP office in a residential area of the city.
One of the dead was an Iraqi national. The other two were Pakistani women, said senior city police official Bin Yameen. Five Pakistanis were wounded, he said.
A severed head and two legs had been discovered, suggesting the attack was launched by a suicide bomber, Mr Yameen said.
The WFP provides food to millions of impoverished Pakistanis.
The agency was recently involved in providing relief to about two million people displaced by an army offensive against militants in the Swat valley, northwest of the capital.
"I went to my office on the first floor and as I sat on my chair there was a huge blast," WFP official Arshad Jadoon told Reuters outside the office. "All of a sudden, a smoke cloud enveloped the building and we came out where wounded people were lying."
Two foreign UN workers were killed in a suicide car bomb attack on a hotel in the northwestern city of Peshawar in June.
The army has made significant progress against militants in the Swat valley and elsewhere in the northwest, and Interior Minister Rehman Malik says the back of the Pakistani Taliban has been broken.
But the militants have struck back with several bomb attacks in recent days as the army prepares to launch an offensive on the Pakistani Taliban's main bastion in the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border.
Reuters