PESHAWAR, Feb 17: Four people were killed and 18 injured when a powerful car bomb exploded near the house of a leader of a local anti-Taliban force in a village in the outskirts of the city on Tuesday.

The blast in Bazidkhel village on the Indus Highway destroyed six houses, a rural health centre and 12 shops.

A local mortuary official told Dawn that seven people had been killed and four bodies had been taken taken away by their legal heir. Three bodies were still in the hospital, he said. However, Badbher police officials did not confirm the casualty figure.

According to police, 35 kilograms of explosives, packed in a car parked outside the residence of Union Council Nazim Fahimur Rehman, was detonated by remote control.

Doctors at the Lady Reading Hospital said that the condition of five of the injured, including two women and two girls, was serious.

The Capital City Police Officer Safwath Ghayur said no one had claimed responsibility for the blast.

Asif Khan, brother of the UC Nazim, told this correspondent he had seated two guests in his Hujra and gone to the house to get tea for them when the blast took place.

“When I came out, there was smoke everywhere and three people were lying in a pool of blood at the main gate of the Hujra. Two cars were burning,” he said.

The dead were identified as Qari Khalid, Hazrat Ali, and Zor Mohammad.

He said two suspected militants, who said they belonged to the Lashkar-i-Islam, had been overpowered by local people.

He blamed the Bara-based militant organisation for the blast and said that the group had attacked his house on Feb 4 and lost nine of its men.

He said the nazim, who headed an anti-Taliban Lashkar of volunteers, had been repeatedly warned to stop anti-militant activities.

Villagers said that the Lashkar’s volunteers had also taken into custody a suspicious car with Islamabad registration plate, believed to have been left by militants escaping in haste.