In the Charsadda bombing of February 9, 2008, a suicide bomber killed 27 people in Charsadda

Charsadda

Charsadda is a town and headquarters of Charsadda District, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. It is located at 34°8'43N 71°43'51E with an altitude of 276 metres and lies 29 kilometres from the provincial capital - Peshawar....

, Pakistan

Pakistan

Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...

 attending a political rally for the opposition Awami National Party

Awami National Party

The Awami National Party is an Pashtun nationalist, socialist, centre-left political party in Pakistan affiliated with Socialist International...

. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz Khan

Hamid Nawaz Khan

Lieutenant General Hamid Nawaz Khan, HI, is a career Pakistan Army soldier who served as Federal Interior Minister from November 2007 to April 2008 and Defence Secretary of Pakistan from 2001 to 2005...

 suspected Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...

 or Taliban-linked groups were responsible after threatening all political parties in the North-West Frontier Province

North-West Frontier Province

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa , formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province and various other names, is one of the four provinces of Pakistan, located in the north-west of the country...

. The bombing occurred nine days before the 2008 Pakistani general election

Pakistani general election, 2008

A general election was held in Pakistan on 18 February 2008, after being postponed from 8 January 2008. The original date was intended to elect members of the National Assembly of Pakistan, the lower house of the Majlis-e-Shoora...

 which was postponed in the wake of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto

Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto occurred on 27 December 2007 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Bhutto, twice Prime Minister of Pakistan and then-leader of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, had been campaigning ahead of elections due in January 2008...

.