TALIBAN VIOLENCE rocked Pakistan again yesterday as militants attacked a strategic airbase, an upmarket restaurant and a bus carrying wedding guests, killing at least 27 people and wounding dozens more.
The bloodshed in North West Frontier province has brought the number of people killed in north-west Pakistan in the last three weeks to more than 200, as a sweeping army assault has pressed in on the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan.
The first blast was at Kamra, the country’s top air force research and maintenance complex, east of Peshawar, when a bicycle-riding suicide bomber detonated his explosives at an entrance. Nine people were killed.
The army strenuously denied suggestions the base was part of the country’s secretive nuclear weapons programme.
Hours later, an explosion in the car park of a recreation complex in Hayatabad, a Peshawar suburb next to the Khyber tribal agency, injured at least 13 people. The complex houses a restaurant, wedding hall and sports club. Police released a photograph of a clean-shaven man wearing sunglasses whom they suspect was the bomber. A third blast ripped through a bus carrying a wedding party in the Mohmand tribal agency, north-east of the city, killing at least 18 people, including four women and three children.
The paramilitary Frontier Corps mounted an offensive against Mohmand militants 15 months ago, but pockets of resistance remain. District officials said the apparently remote-controlled blast may have been intended for one of the corps convoys that often use the same route.
“Militants might have hit the bus mistakenly,” said an official, Zabit Khan.
The multifaceted attacks of recent weeks – targets have included a UN office, an Islamic university and the army headquarters – suggest a new strategy of varied and unpredictable attacks.
An attack on the International Islamic University in Islamabad this week shattered assumptions that centres of Islamic scholarship were beyond the reach of the militants and triggered the government-ordered closure of every school and university in the country.
Prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told his cabinet this week that the country’s nuclear infrastructure was safe.
A militant seizure of a nuclear weapon is a nightmare scenario for many western officials. Pakistan’s military says security precautions make it virtually impossible.
Islamabad has an increasingly besieged air, with a mushrooming number of barricades, soldiers and sandbagged walls reminiscent of Baghdad or Kabul. Yesterday workmen hastily fortified an embassy wall along the city’s Margalla road, which was hit by a suicide bomber earlier this year.
The army drive into South Waziristan is reaching the end of its first week, with soldiers and Taliban fighters engaged in heavy fighting in several places.
An army statement said 13 militants and two soldiers had been killed in the previous 24 hours. The heaviest fighting has been around Kotkai, home of the Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, where the army said it captured an important vantage point overlooking the village. – (Guardian service)