as clinton starts pakistan visit 100 dead include many women, children

Police and rescue workers carry an injured man from the scene of an explosion in Peshawar yesterday after a car bomb ripped through a crowded market, killing at least 100 people.

A huge car bomb ripped through a crowded market in Pakistan yesterday, killing at least 100 people and underscoring the gravity of the extremist threat destabilizing the nuclear-armed Muslim state.

The explosion brought down buildings in the northwestern city of Peshawar just hours after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Pakistan to bolster the two countries' troubled alliance against Taliban and Al-Qa'ida militants.

Doctors at the Lady Reading Hospital said many of the casualties were women and children, as a routine day out in the city's main bazaar ended in horror and eclipsed Clinton's first visit as secretary of state to Pakistan.

Peshawar is home to 2.5 million people and a gateway to the tribal badlands where the military is pressing a massive offensive against the Taliban in its toughest battle yet against a well-trained enemy on forbidding terrain.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was outraged at the "appalling" attack and the loss of so many lives.

Clinton, unveiling a $215-million energy investment and trying to fend off fierce Pakistani criticism of U.S. policies, expressed solidarity after one of the country's deadliest attacks and called for a new partnership.

"This is our struggle as well," said Clinton, condemning the "tenacious and brutal extremist groups who kill innocent people and terrorize communities."

Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi insisted the country was unswerving in its fight against those responsible.

"People who are carrying out such heinous crimes want to shake our resolve. We will not buckle, we will fight you," he added.

Flames reached out of burning wreckage and smoke billowed over the collapsed rubble of a mosque and three buildings, where rescue workers picked charred bodies out of smouldering debris and gathered human flesh in plastic bags.

"Some people are still trapped," bomb disposal official Shafqat Malik told reporters as the death toll rose.

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