PESHAWAR: A suicide bomber blew up a car packed with explosives in the middle of a crowd gathered for a volleyball game in a northwest Pakistan village today, killing at least 40 people.

In the small town of Shah Hasan Khan in Bannu district, which borders Taliban stronghold South Waziristan, a man detonated his vehicle as sports fans gathered at a field to watch two local teams face off at volleyball.

“The villagers were watching the match between

the two village teams when the bomber rashly drove his double-cabin pick-up vehicle into them and blew it up,” district police chief Mohammad Ayub Khan told AFP.

“At least 40 people have died and the toll is likely to rise,” he added, estimating the crowd at the game to number about 200.

One of his deputies Habibullah Khan said that 50 people were also wounded.

Mushtaq Marwat, a member of a local anti-Taliban group, told Geo television that the committee was meeting at a nearby mosque when the bomber stuck.

Women and children were pulled from the rubble of a nearby house that collapsed in the blast.

Also Friday, an anti-Taliban tribal leader and four others were killed in a roadside bomb in Bajaur tribal district, the latest in a wave of attacks against respected elders allied with the government against the extremists.

Obama’s administration is pressuring Islamabad to crack down on not only the Pakistani Taliban, but also Al-Qaeda fighters and militants who cross the border and attack US and NATO forces stationed in Afghanistan.

The foreign forces in Afghanistan also rely on Pakistan as a transport route for supplies, and on Friday gunmen ambushed two tankers travelling though the southwestern province of Baluchistan headed to NATO troops.

Local police official Mohammad Ansar told AFP that one of the trucks was badly damaged by fire, but no one was killed in the attack in a province troubled by both Islamist and separatist violence.

Security has plummeted over the last two-and-a-half years in Pakistan, where militant violence has killed more than 2,800 people since July 2007.

The northwest has suffered the brunt of a militant campaign, with suicide bombings and attacks increasingly targetting civilians. At least 125 people were killed in a suicide car bomb in October in provincial capital Peshawar