Bomb injures 13 people in Quetta

The judge who was targeted in the blast, Zahoor Shehwani, survived. However, his security escort vehicle was damaged, with four police personnel and nine passersby injured, said Hamid Shakeel, a senior local police official.

Four of the injured officers were in critical condition, said Abdul Majeed, a medic at the city's main hospital.

"It was a judge's car that was passing, but I believe it was the police who were the target," Home Minister Safaraz Bugti told Pakistani TV. "It was a remote-controlled device with 3-4 kg of explosives ... I think these kinds of cowardly acts will not reduce our morale," Bugti said.

"The bomb was planted on a bridge in the city, which went off immediately after the vehicle of an Islamic court judge passed by it," Akbar Harifal, the home secretary of southwestern Balochistan province - the country's most dangerous - told the news agency AFP.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for Thursday's attack.

The attack came three days after a suicide bombing at a Quetta hospital killed 74 people, many of them senior lawyers, in what was Pakistan's deadliest attack this year. It was claimed by both the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA) faction of the Pakistani Taliban, and the "Islamic State" group.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (pictured above) vowed on Wednesday to crush militancy with "full force."

About 60,000 Pakistanis have died in a decade of violence by al-Qaida and its Taliban allies.

jbh/kl (AFP, dpa, Reuters)