Bombings Kill 53 in Pakistan’s Lahore as Lull in Attacks Ends
March 12, 2010, 7:09 AM ESTBy Khalid Qayum and Farhan Sharif
March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Two suicide bombers attacked an army convoy in Pakistan’s Lahore, killing at least 53 people and injuring 95 in the second attack on the city this week, police and rescue services said.
Two men wearing bombs approached vehicles in the convoy as it drove through an area where army officers live and work, police spokesman Chaudhry Shafeeq said. They detonated explosives, killing at least 10 army personnel, he told reporters in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city.
A suicide car bomb outside a police building in Lahore killed 12 people on March 8, the first attack in the city this year. The past six weeks had seen a decline in the number of bombings in cities that are a main target for militants fighting the U.S.-backed government.
Since the Pakistani army launched an offensive last year that seized most of the main Taliban stronghold, in South Waziristan on the Afghan border, militants have retaliated with bombs and guerrilla raids in cities. Punjab, the homeland of most Pakistani army leaders and the country’s most populous province, has been repeatedly hit. Lahore is the Punjab provincial capital.
The army’s operations last year in the northwest, from where many Taliban fighters hail, were accompanied by escalated U.S. missile attacks launched from unmanned aircraft. The strikes killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud last year and, Pakistan says, his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, in January. The Taliban deny Hakimullah Mehsud is dead.
Afghanistan War
The U.S. aims to suppress the Taliban in Pakistan because their strongholds in the country serve as bases for the growing Taliban war against a U.S.-led NATO force and the government it backs in neighboring Afghanistan.
Today’s attackers in Lahore each carried bombs with 10 to 12 kilograms of explosives, said Rana Sanaullah, spokesman for the Punjab government. The attackers were young men from the Taliban-dominated Pashtun tribal areas on the Afghan border, he told reporters in Lahore.
“Our people and our security forces are facing and fighting terrorists,” Sanaullah said. “The terrorists cannot break our resolve of eliminating militancy.”
The first explosion today occurred at 12:48 p.m. local time on a road near Lahore’s RA Bazar, according to Rescue 1122. The second blast followed seconds later, it said. Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural center and is 270 kilometers (170 miles) southeast of the capital, Islamabad.
--With assistance from James Rupert in New Delhi. Editors: Mark Williams, Naween A. Mangi
To contact the reporters on this story: Khalid Qayum in Islamabad at kqayum@bloomberg.net;
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stephen Foxwell at sfoxwell@bloomberg.net.
