Coordinated Attacks Strike Cultural Heart of Pakistan

Coordinated Attacks Strike Cultural Heart of Pakistan
By JANE PERLEZ and SALMAN MASOOD
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/world/asia/16pstan.html?_r=1&ref=global-home


ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Militants dressed in police uniforms simultaneously attacked three law enforcement agencies in Lahore on Thursday morning, the fifth major attack in Pakistan in the last 10 days.

The assaults took place on the regional center of the Federal Investigation Agency and two police training centers just before 9:30 a.m. in Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province and Pakistan’s second most populous city.

More than 30 people were killed, including 19 police officers and at least 11 militants, police officials said.

The umbrella group for the Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-e-Taliban, claimed responsibility for the multiple attacks in Lahore, the independent television news channel, GEO, reported on its Web site.

Also on Thursday, militants attacked a police station in the garrison town of Kohat, killing eight people, in the North-West Frontier Province, and a car bombing killed one person in a residential complex in Peshawar, the capital of that province.

The coordinated attacks, the most sophisticated in a wave of violence that began this month, threw parts of Lahore into chaos, closing roads and shuttering shops and offices.

Five militants scaled the wall of the police training center, where more than 800 recruits had just started classes, said Maj. Gen. Shafqat Ahmed, the officer commanding security forces in Lahore.

In the ensuing two-hour battle between the hundreds of army commandos and the gunmen, one attacker was killed early on and another detonated a suicide bomb. The three surviving militants then tried to move to a residential compound, but families locked themselves inside while commandos fired on the assailants.

Six police officers were killed and seven were wounded, police officials said. In all, five of the attackers were killed, they said.

The attack on the elite school was particularly unnerving because its graduates, trained in counterterrorism techniques, are considered the toughest in the province. They wear black T-shirts with the words “No Fear” inscribed on the back and are easily distinguished by their fit physiques and well-trimmed hair.

In Islamabad, officials expressed dismay at more attacks five days after Taliban militants had attacked the nation’s army headquarters in Rawalpindi, taking more than 40 hostages and raising serious questions about the security of the military establishment in the nuclear-armed nation.

“The enemy has started a guerrilla war,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said. The nation had to unite to defeat “this handful of terrorists.”

But other officials said Pakistan was handicapped in fighting the onslaught because of discord between the civilian government and the military that spilled into the open in the last week, particularly over American aid legislation that the army said represented a violation of sovereignty.

“We cannot fight the Taliban when the army and the government are at loggerheads,” said Jahangir Tareen, a member of Parliament from Punjab and a former federal minister.

The interior minister, Mr. Malik, a confidant of President Asif Ali Zardari, was prevented from entering the army headquarters on Wednesday for a ceremony he had been invited to, apparently because he has fallen into disfavor with the military command.

The synchronized attacks in Lahore appeared to be timed ahead of a planned offensive by the Pakistani Army against the headquarters of the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan, and may have been intended to send an ominous signal that the militants were daring the army to come and get them.

By exposing the weak links in the country’s security apparatus and complacency among top officials, the Thursday’s attacks again risked undermining the faith of ordinary Pakistanis in the military, the police and the intelligence agencies, said a retired army brigadier, Javaid Hussain.

The frequency of the assaults, Mr. Hussain said, also demonstrated that the new Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, remained aligned closely to Al Qaeda and was receiving technical training, planning and support for the attacks from the terrorist organization. They furthermore showed how the Taliban was working in tandem with the cells and supporters among jihadist groups, such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammad, based in southern Punjab, Brig. Hussain said.

Baitullah Mehsud, the previous Taliban leader, was killed in an American missile strike in August.

At the Federal Investigation Agency, a law enforcement branch that deals with matters ranging from immigration to terrorism, gunmen forced their way into the building, and at least 10 people died, including a militant, four police officials and two civilians.

An assistant inspector said he heard shooting as he left his post to eat breakfast. “I heard firing at around 9:30 and rushed back,” said Ziaullah, the assistant inspector, who gave only one name. “The scene was horrific. The duty inspector was dead at the spot.”

A witness working near the building said he had seen a man in his 20s running toward the compound. “He started spraying bullets, then there was constant firing for 15 minutes and two low-intensity explosions,” said Muhammad Aslam, who makes fresh juice in a neighborhood shop.

About 50 officials of the agency were reported stranded on the first floor of the building before security forces ended the siege, according to local television reports, but they had not been taken hostage.

Simultaneously, militants dressed in police uniforms stormed another police academy in Manawan, a suburb of Lahore.

Two detonated suicide explosives soon after entering the center, police officials said. Army commandos launched an assault about 30 minutes after the attack began, police officials said. By the time it was over, nine police officers and five militants lay dead.

The 10-day killing spree by the Taliban began with a suicide bombing of the World Food Program of the United Nations in the capital 10 days ago. Then, militants attacked a busy bazaar in Peshawar, the provincial capital of the North-West Frontier Province. After the siege at the military headquarters in Rawalpindi, militants hit an army convoy at a crowded market in Shangla, on the edge of the Swat Valley.

The army announced its intention to launch a ground offensive against the Taliban nerve center in South Waziristan two months ago but so far has refrained from using ground troops, instead using airstrikes and throwing a cordon over the area.

The decision to delay the ground offensive will now come under scrutiny, said Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province.

An army operation immediately after the death of Baitullah Mehsud would have made it much more difficult for the militants to stage Thursday’s attacks, Mr. Aziz said. Instead, the militants had been allowed to launch pre-emptive attacks before the army moved against them, he said.

Waqar Gillani contributed reporting from Lahore, Pakistan.