ISLAMABAD: Militants targeted Pakistan’s law enforcement facilities in the Punjab capital of Lahore and the northwest with coordinated bomb attacks on Thursday, leaving 39 people dead and dozens injured in an escalating wave of violence.
President Asif Ali Zardari said the bloodshed would not deter the government from its mission to eliminate the extremists.
No group immediately claimed responsibility, though suspicion fell on the Pakistani Taleban who have claimed other recent strikes that have killed 100 people in the past week.
The violence, just days after a daring raid on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, underscored the risk posed by militants to Punjab, Pakistan’s most economically important province and the country’s traditional seat of power.
“First the (Northwest) Frontier province was on the front line, now they are playing their games in Punjab,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Geo television. “The enemy has started a guerrilla war. The whole nation should be united against these handful of terrorists, and God willing we will defeat them.”
Lahore Commissioner Khusro Pervez accused Indian intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of financing the attacks in the city, which is 40 km from the Indian frontier.
The assaults began about 9 a.m. when a gunman wearing civilian clothes and a suicide vest burst into the offices of the Federal Investigation Agency, the national law enforcement body, and began shooting, said Rana Sanaullah, Punjab law minister. He killed six people, four of them civilians, and was killed by guards at the building before he could detonate his explosives.
Soon after, three gunmen raided a police training school on the outskirts of the city, killing 11 officers and recruits, before police killed all the attackers, Sanaullah said. The facility was the scene earlier this year of an eight-hour militant standoff that left 12 people dead.
A third team then scaled the back wall of a police commando training center near the airport, Lahore police chief Pervez Rathore said. The attackers stood on the roof of a house, shooting at security forces and throwing grenades as residents inside shut themselves up, said Lt. Gen. Shafqat Ahmad, the top military officer in Lahore.
The four assailants were killed, along with a police officer and a civilian, Sanaullah said, adding that the gunmen in all three attacks carried dried fruit and apparently were preparing to dig in for a long siege.
In the Taleban-infested northwest, a suicide car bomb exploded near a police station in Kohat city, collapsing half the building and killing 11 people — three police officers and eight civilians, Kohat police chief Abdullah Khan said.
Early Thursday evening, another bomb exploded in a car outside a housing complex for government employees in Peshawar, killing a six-year-old boy and wounding nine others, most of them women and children, said Liaqat Ali Khan, the top police official in the region. He said an assailant parked the car outside the house and walked away before detonating the bomb through remote control.
— With input from agencies
