At least 16 people were killed and 30 wounded Friday when a bomb exploded at a vegetable market in the southernwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, officials told AFP.
Balochistan police chief Mohsen Butt confirmed the toll, adding that eight people from the Hazara ethnic group were among the victims, as well as a security official and workers in the market.
Police official Abdul Razzaq Shima said the explosion took place in Hazarganji district of Quetta, capital of the province.
An AFP reporter saw scattered human remains and blood as the wounded screamed for help.
A local police official at the vegetable market center, who survived the blast, said the area was overcrowded when the blast occurred early on Friday.
At that time, truckloads of vegetables arrived from outside the city before traders moved them to smaller vehicles and delivered them around Quetta.
"I was loading a pickup truck when I heard a loud bang as if the ground had been shaken under me," worker Ifran Khan, who was in his twenties, told AFP from a hospital in Quetta where he was being treated for minor injuries.
"The air was filled with black smoke and I could not see anything," he said, "I could hear the screams of people crying and I too cried out for help."
He fainted and regained consciousness at the hospital. He was wounded by shrapnel and the doctors assured him that he would leave the hospital soon.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Baluchistan province, bordering Afghanistan and Iran, is Pakistan´s largest and poorest province. With ethnic and sectarian violence and a separatist insurgency.
Hazara represents about 500,000 of Quetta´s 2.3 million people. They are often targeted, and the police chief confirmed that the victims of the Friday blast were every time they visited the market enjoyed police protection.
"The same thing happened today," he said. "There were members of the police who were protecting them when the attack took place."
He said police were investigating the type of device that exploded.
Violence in Pakistan has fallen sharply since the deadliest attack by gunmen on a school in Peshawar in northwest Pakistan in 2014 that killed more than 150 people, mostly children.
