At least 22 people have been killed in a car bombing in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore.
The blast, which rescue officials said had left 25 people wounded, struck near a popular vegetable market in the centre of the city.
A spokesman for the Punjab provincial government said authorities were trying to establish the exact cause of the explosion.
Police officer Kashif Aslam said the bombing targeted policemen who were providing security for demolition work at a nearby building. Most of the casualties were policemen.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
Video posted on Twitter showed a person on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.
Local hospitals declared an emergency after Monday’s explosion on Ferozpur Road, a main thoroughfare that cuts through the city.
The bomb went off in one of the most secure parts of the city, near to where the Chief Minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, has his office.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the chief minister strongly condemned blast.
In April, a suicide attack on soldiers in Lahore killed six people and wounded 18.
The city was also targeted in February when 13 were killed at a protest rally outside the Punjab Assembly.
Police officers and journalists covering the march were among the casualties.
The attacker, a member of a group allied to the Pakistani Taliban, drove a motorbike into crowds before detonating an explosive device.
Lahore was also targeted on Easter Sunday last year in an attack that claimed the lives of 75 people.
Thousands of suspected terrorists were arrested as part of Pakistan's paramilitary crackdown on Islamist militants in the wake of the attack.
