A senior leader of the Taliban in Pakistin today claimed responsibility for the bomb attack in Lahore that killed at least 24 people and wounded hundreds more, saying it was revenge for the army offensive against militants in Swat valley.
Hakimullah Mehsud, a deputy to the Pakistani Taliban chief, Baitullah Mehsud, told the Associated Press that the attack on the offices of the police chief and Pakistan's main spy agency, the ISI, was connected to the military operation.
"It was in response to the Swat operation where innocent people have been killed," Mehsud said. The little-known group Taliban Movement in Punjab has also claimed responsibility for the attack.
The attack was the third in Lahore in as many months and Pakistanis have been bracing themselves for violent retaliation since the army launched a sweeping operation against the Taliban in Swat valley three weeks ago.
"These terrorists were defeated in Fata [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] and Swat and now they have come here," the interior minister, Rehman Malik, said yesterday. "This is a war, and it is a war for our survival."
As Malik spoke, rescuers were scrambling to pull the dead and wounded from the wreckage of destroyed buildings. Twelve police officers and one child were among the dead, a television station reported. Twenty people were injured when the roof of the operating theatre in a nearby hospital collapsed on them.
Sajjad Bhutto, a senior government official, said four men had leapt from a car that pulled up outside a police building near the ISI headquarters. The men, who were described as young and clean-shaven by witnesses, started shooting.
Guards outside the spy agency returned fire, sparking a short gun battle that ended when the car, which had crashed into a security barrier, exploded. The blast levelled an emergency response building across the street and sheared a wall from the ISI office, where two intelligence officers and six others were killed.
It left a scene of devastation along the mall – a tree-lined, colonial-era thoroughfare. A petrol station was destroyed, and broken glass and crushed vehicles littered the road. Later distraught relatives turned up, looking for family members.
Bhutto said 100kg of explosives were used in the bomb.
The attack was no surprise, said Dr Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based defence analyst. "We were expecting there would be some kind of retaliation," he said, drawing a link with the ongoing operations in Swat. "The surprise was that it was such a massive attack."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/28/pakistan-bomb
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