Pakistan & Nukes

At Least 24 Killed as Two Bombs Strike Pakistan
By SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Two powerful explosions in suicide attacks minutes apart rocked the eastern city of Lahore on Tuesday, killing 24 people, the Interior Ministry said.

The first blast ripped through the regional office of the Federal Investigation Agency, Pakistan’s chief federal law enforcement agency, killing 12 agency officials and 9 others. A suicide bomber detonated his truck packed with explosives after forcing his way inside the agency’s parking area.

In the second attack, several miles away, two people drove a small pickup truck to a house being used as an office for an advertising company in Model Town, an upscale residential neighborhood, Interior Ministry and police officials said.

They exploded themselves and the truck, destroying the front of the house, damaging neighboring buildings and killing three people, two of them children, the Interior Ministry said.

Model Town is where many senior politicians, including Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, maintain homes. A senior Pakistan Peoples Party official, Farahnaz Ispahani, said the party’s senior leadership was in Islamabad.

The two attacks wounded 170 people, including several children, filling many of the city’s hospitals and setting off a wave of panic.

Till this year Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, had been spared the recent wave of violence that hit Islamabad, the capital, and northwestern Pakistan, but it has now been struck by three major suicide attacks since January.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility, but the explosions seemed to follow a pattern of recent attacks on law enforcement officials and the Pakistani military by tribal militants, said Tariq Pervez, the director general of the Federal Investigation Agency.

“The building of F.I.A. was a clear target,” Mr. Pervez said in an interview. “Now, the terrorists are stepping up their activity in Punjab.”

He said extremist groups might be singling out Lahore because police officers from Punjab, including officers from his agency, were involved in the operation at the Red Mosque in Islamabad last year, in which government troops killed many militants who had been holed up inside.

The first suicide bombing, which occurred around 9:20 during the morning rush, was so powerful that it was heard for miles. More than two hundred people were reported to be inside the agency building.

The explosion damaged many nearby buildings. The agency office is situated on the busy Temple Road, and commercial and residential buildings and a few schools are nearby.

Local news channels showed gory images of destruction. More than two dozen vehicles, crumpled like paper, lay scattered on the road outside the building.

Plumes of smoke billowed from the building, most of it destroyed. Officials warned that the eight-floor building could collapse at any time. Distraught relatives were shown standing near the debris.

In January, the Interior Ministry circulated a confidential memorandum to provincial police chiefs and officials, asking them to tighten security surrounding several top politicians. The Interior Ministry also identified the investigation agency’s headquarters in Islamabad as a potential target.

The memorandum warned that terrorists had made videos of several government locations and sent them to militants in the semiautonomous tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, where the Pakistani Army is battling groups sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The Federal Investigation Agency’s office in Lahore, however, was not identified as a potential target.