DUSHANBE: Two suicide bombers in an explosives-packed car slammed into a police station in Tajikistan on Friday, killing two police officers and wounding at least 25 others, interior ministry officials said.

The car crashed into an iron gate in front of a regional police headquarters in the northern city of Khujand at high speed and exploded, killing the two drivers and partially demolishing the building.

“A number of officers were missing, feared dead in the rubble.

The massive blast shattered windows in blocks near the station,” witnesses said.

“Two police officers were killed in the explosion. Two terrorists were (also) killed,” interior ministry spokesman Colonel Mukhammadjon Nazriyev told reporters.

“The building was severely damaged as a result of the powerful explosion, and 25 police officers were taken to hospital with varying degrees of injuries,” he added.

Nazriyev blamed the bombing on Al Qaeda-linked militant group the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, saying the attack had been an attempt to free Islamist fighters being held on murder charges in Khujand.

One doctor reached by telephone at a hospital in Khujand told reporters that the majority of the injured were being treated for shrapnel wounds, and that some were in critical condition.

The toll from the bombing could rise as investigators continued to search the rubble of the building for the bodies of missing officers, an interior ministry official told reporters.

Residents of Khujand, a city of around 150,000 people in a mountainous area of northern Tajikistan near the volatile Fergana Valley, described panic as the explosion shook the city.

“The explosion was very strong. I left my home and on my way to school I dropped into a shop and the shopkeeper told me that they had blown up the police department,” 57-year-old Hursandoi Navruzova told the reporter by telephone.

“It’s just horrible. I immediately saw the fear on the face of everyone I met,” she added.

The blast came a day after Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmon sacked his long-time security boss following a humiliating prison break last month in which a group of 25 Al Qaeda-linked militants escaped and killed six guards.