At least 23 people, mostly policemen, were killed and 70 others injured in a suicide bomb attack in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore, two weeks after former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a gunfire-and- suicide attack.

 

''The suicide bomber rammed his motorcycle into a police van when officers tried to stop him from entering the area,'' Aftab Cheema, senior police superintendent, said in a telephone interview from Lahore.

The bomb exploded at a police checkpoint in the General Post Office Chowk area, Cheema said. A large number of police had been deployed in the area because of a protest rally planned by lawyers.

 

Over 600 people have been killed in several suicide attacks across the country since July, the army has said. Pakistan's military has been fighting pro-Taliban militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan since 2003.

 

Fighting has intensified since troops stormed Islamabad's Red Mosque in July, ending a challenge to the government by pro- Taliban clerics seeking to impose Islamic law in the capital.

 

Former premier Bhutto was killed in an attack in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, near the capital, Islamabad, on Dec. 27 as she finished addressing an election rally.