A bomb-laden rickshaw exploded in a busy market in Sarai Naurang town in Pakistan's Lakki Marwat district shortly after 11am local time on Tuesday, killing at least nine people and wounding 30, according to emergency workers and a hospital official. The Lakki Marwat administration declared an emergency at the district headquarters hospital, with the most seriously injured being moved by ambulance to the larger trauma centre at Bannu.
Sarai Naurang sits at a road junction between Bannu, Lakki Marwat and Dera Ismail Khan in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a stretch of territory that has seen a sustained campaign of attacks by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) since the Afghan Taliban's return to power in Kabul in 2021. Police Inspector-General Akhtar Hayat Khan Gandapur, in remarks to local media on Tuesday afternoon, attributed the blast to the TTP and said the rickshaw had been driven into a queue of customers at a tea shop next to the market's vegetable stalls.
The TTP, a Pakistani militant alliance distinct from but ideologically aligned with the Afghan Taliban, has carried out at least 31 attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since the start of the year, a rate roughly 40 per cent higher than the comparable period of 2025. Most of the targets have been police checkpoints and military convoys, but commercial markets — easier to reach and harder to harden — have featured in five of the deadliest incidents.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and President Asif Ali Zardari each issued statements of condemnation. The prime minister directed the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister to coordinate the medical response and the federal interior minister Mohsin Naqvi to "take strict action against the perpetrators". A federal cabinet committee on national security is expected to meet on Wednesday morning to review the operational tempo of the counter-terrorism campaign.
Pakistan's relations with the Afghan Taliban regime have been deteriorating in parallel. Islamabad has accused Kabul of providing safe haven to TTP leadership; the Taliban deny it. A round of bilateral talks scheduled for Doha in late April was cancelled after Pakistani air strikes on alleged TTP camps in Paktika province in March, and no replacement date has been set.
The economic backdrop is also fragile. The rupee was unchanged on Tuesday at 279.95 to the dollar, with the State Bank of Pakistan continuing the careful market-led depreciation strategy it adopted at the end of February. Foreign-exchange reserves stood at $14.8 billion as of last week, an eight-month high but still equivalent to just over two months of import cover.