A suicide car bomb ripped through a packed shopping street in Pakistan's northwest town of Charsadda yesterday, killing at least 30 people and wounding around 55, officials said.

The suicide bomber detonated a vehicle in the heart of the small market town, on a road lined with juice shops and women's clothing stores, the third bomb attack in three consecutive days in northwest Pakistan, police said.

"We have received 18 dead bodies, three of them are children, more than 25 were injured," Doctor Zulfiqar Ahmad told AFP by

telephone from the main hospital in the town, just outside the main northwestern city of Peshawar.

"We have declared an emergency in the hospital," he added. Other casualties were taken to Peshawar, where the main Lady Reading Hospital received at least five wounded victims in the immediate aftermath of the late afternoon attack.

Charsadda district police chief Mohammad Riaz Khan told Geo television: "This is a busy area. It is usually crowded in the evening time. It took place in the main bazaar. There was no security lapse. I had just crossed this area one minute before the blast," he added.

"Certainly, it was a suicide car explosion," Khan said.

It was the third suicide bomb ing in three days in the northwest, which lies on the edge of the tribal badlands infested with al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked militants where Pakistan is pressing a major offensive into a fourth week.

On Monday, a suicide bomber killed three people in Peshawar after stepping out of a rickshaw and detonating his explosives at a police checkpoint on the outer ring road of the metropolis.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has suffered a wave of Islamist bombings since July 2007, has been rocked by a spike in bloodshed killing more than 350 people since early October and forcing troops onto the offensive in the tribal area.