PESHAWAR/BANNU: A bomb wounded 11 people, mostly children, when it exploded outside a girls' school in Bannu on Thursday, a doctor said.

The bomb went off at the end of the school day as pupils walked into a street lined with fabric shops in the northwestern town of Bannu, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Doctor Omar Zeb told news agency AFP that 11 people had been brought to the local hospital – seven primary schoolgirls and four other people who had been in the street.

Police official Azad Khan told AFP that at least four girls, two boys and a man had been wounded. Three of them are in serious condition he said.

Meanwhile, a suspected militant was killed and another arrested by police during an overnight clash with residents in Bannu, DawnNews reported.

According to the police, residents of the area Haji Anwar Khel area spotted six suspicious men Wednesday night and asked them to stop. However, the suspected men opened fire on the area’s dwellers.

During an exchange of fire between the two sides, one suspect was killed whereas another was captured and handed over to the police. The remaining four suspects escaped from the site of incident.

Approximately three kilograms of explosive material was also recovered from the men. Police said the suspects were aged between 14 and 15 years. A case was lodged against the suspected militants at the local police station.

The northwestern town of Bannu, which stands at the gateway to the semiautonomous Waziristan tribal region, is 150 kilometres southwest of Peshawar, the capital of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The town has witnessed a number of attacks and was the scene of a massive jail break in April 2012 during which 384 prisoners escaped from its central prison.

Nato truck attacked

In a separate incident on Thursday, unidentified gunmen on a motorbike fired Thursday at a Nato supply truck in the northwestern city of Peshawar and wounded two people, police said.

The attack took place near Karkhano market on the edge of Peshawar and close to the Khyber tribal district where extremist militants are said to be active.

“Two people were wounded in firing on a Nato truck which was carrying military vehicles from Afghanistan to the Pakistani port city of Karachi,” local police official Daud Khan told AFP.

The Khyber district straddles the Nato supply line used by US-led troops to evacuate military equipment ahead of their 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan.