PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) — Pakistani police defused a roadside timebomb just minutes before opposition leader Nawaz Sharif was due to pass the spot in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Thursday, officials said.
Former prime minister Sharif was travelling in a convoy to address a lawyers' convention and a political rally in the troubled city near the Afghan border ahead of elections on February 18.
The discovery comes exactly four weeks after fellow opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a gun and suicide attack at an election meeting in the northern city of Rawalpindi.
"We recovered a 400 gram (0.8 pounds) bomb fitted with a timer beneath a main bridge near the high court on the route that Sharif was to take. We have defused it," bomb disposal squad official Hukam Khan told AFP.
Ijaz Khan, a senior police officer, said the bomb was found wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.
"It was planted on the road that Nawaz Sharif was to pass. When policemen were searching the area they found it and immediately called in bomb disposal staff who defused it," Khan said.
A spokesman for Sharif said their convoy had been halted about a kilometre (half a mile) before it reached the area.
"We are sitting in the car. Police have stopped our convoy. They have said there is a report of some explosives in the area where we were supposed to go," the spokesman told AFP by telephone.
Pakistani officials have said that Sharif and other politicians are targets for Islamic militants trying to destabilise the nuclear-armed nation ahead of the elections.
The government has blamed a tribal warlord with alleged links to Al-Qaeda for assassinating Bhutto on December 27. Unrest sparked by her death caused elections to be postponed by six weeks.
Four of Sharif's supporters were killed in a gun attack on his convoy in Rawalpindi on the same day that Bhutto was killed.
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