Bomb Kills Seven Pakistani Soldiers and Dozens Injures

A bomb killed seven Pakistani soldiers and wounded 11 others Saturday, officials said, after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Al-Qaeda is at the core of the country's terrorist threat.

"Seven paramilitary soldiers were killed and 11 were wounded in the remote-control bomb attack," Shafirullah Khan, the top administrative official in the northwestern tribal district of Khyber, told AFP by telephone.

Military and security officials in nearby Peshawar city confirmed the incident, saying two vehicles carrying rations for Pakistani troops were destroyed in the blast. It occurred about 15 kilometres (nine miles) west of Peshawar, AFP reports.

According to Bloomberg, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ended a three-day visit to Pakistan in which she confronted intense anti-American sentiment in a nuclear-armed country that has become a central front for violent extremists.

Wielding the celebrity she enjoys in Pakistan as a former first lady who first visited in 1995, Clinton tried to close the trust deficit that strains U.S.-Pakistani ties. She appeared on live television and in newspaper pages pledging to support democracy and development and praising the military for its five-month campaign against Taliban strongholds.

Clinton "broke the ice" by risking her security to visit Lahore and Islamabad, two cities that have suffered terrorist attacks, and listening to "suspicion, anger and aggression" from Pakistani audiences, Jugnu Mohsin, publisher of the Lahore- based Friday Times newspaper group, said in an interview.

President Asif Ali Zardari, speaking to members of his Pakistan People's Party, said Friday that "there was no turning back ... until the complete elimination of the militants," according to a statement from his office, The Associated Press reports.

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