Blast kills 2 in Pak cinema house

The explosion ripped through the Palwasha movie theatre just after midnight in Mingora city in the lower Swat valley, a picturesque river valley popular with holidaymakers some 100km north of provincial capital Peshawar.

"The bomb was placed in a plastic bag which exploded a moment before the end of the last show of the movie in Palwasha cinema," district police officer Syed Akhtar Ali Shah told AFP by telephone.

Mingora is close to the Afghan border and is a stronghold of Islamic fundamentalists.

Shah said it was too early to speculate who could be behind the attack.

"We are analyzing it," he said.