Lahore, PAKISTAN (Agencies)
Two huge suicide car bombs ripped through a police building and an advertising office in Lahore Tuesday, killing 25 people and posing a fresh challenge to Pakistan's incoming government.
The deadliest blast demolished much of the eight-storey federal police headquarters in the heart of the eastern city, and the other hit an advertising agency several kilometers (miles) away.
"It was a suicide attack on the FIA office and it was the target," Lahore police chief Malik Mohammad Iqbal told AFP, adding that at least 21 people were killed in the bombing and more than 100 wounded.
FIA chief Tariq Pervaz said paramedics were "trying to rescue survivors from under the rubble." FIA sources said that at least 10 employees were among the dead.
The building also housed the offices of a U.S.-trained special investigation unit created to counter terrorism, which was possibly the intended target, security officials said.
The second near-simultaneous blast was also caused by a suicide car bomb and hit an advertising agency in an upscale neighborhood of the city, killing another four people, including two children, police said.
President Pervez Musharraf, a key U.S. ally in the "war on terror", condemned the "savage act" and said the "acts of terrorism cannot deter government's resolve to fight the scourge with full force," state media reported.
Pakistan has been rocked by six major blasts since parliamentary polls on February 18, which were won by the opposition parties of slain ex-premier Benazir Bhutto and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
Bhutto herself was killed in a suicide attack in the garrison city of Rawalpindi on December 27. |
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New parliament to meet Musharraf on Tuesday summoned the new parliament to meet on March 17, his spokesman Rashid Qureshi told AFP -- finally setting up showdown with his rivals that could potentially further destabilise the nuclear-armed nation.
Bhutto's widower Asif Ali Zardari and Sharif on Sunday agreed to form a coalition government that is expected to take on Musharraf, who seized power in a coup in 1999, but they must also grapple with the tide of violence engulfing the country.
Pakistan has been combating an Islamist insurgency led by al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters since Musharraf joined the U.S.-led "war on terror" in 2001, but the violence has soared since the start of 2007. |
