PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A suicide bomber killed himself in an attack on a police van in the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar on Friday, but neither of the policemen in the vehicle were hurt, police said.

US soldiers from the 561st Military Police Company attached to the 10th Mountain Division in Bagram, Afghanistan, October 29, 2006. Al Qaeda is reinvigorating its operations from havens on the Afghan-Pakistani border and poses a growing challenge to US interests in both Iraq and Afghanistan, American intelligence officials said on Wednesday. [Reuters]

"It was a suicide attack. The suicide bomber was killed," Iftikhar Khan, a superintendent of police, told Reuters.

Islamist groups seeking to destabilize the government because of President Pervez Musharraf's alliance with the United States in the war on terrorism are suspected of being behind a wave of attacks in the region in recent weeks.

Pakistani security forces also inflamed anger among pro-Taliban militant tribesmen in the area bordering Afghanistan by carrying out an airstrike on a religious school at the end of October that killed about 80 suspected militants.

Days later, a suicide attacker detonated a bomb among army recruits on a training ground in a nearby northwestern town, killing 42 of them. It was the bloodiest ever militant strike on Pakistani security forces.

Police said the bomber killed on Friday was a 20-year-old man who had been living in Peshawar. His father came to the scene and identified the body, police said. The dead man was said to have been a committed Muslim.

There have been more than half a dozen bombs in Peshawar in recent weeks, including one that killed six people and wounded more than 30 in a crowded market on October 20.