Karachi Commander Escapes Attack, 11 Killed

The deadly attack on the motorcade of the Corps Commander Lt Gen Ahson Saleem Hayat, the highest ranking military officer in the city, took place when he was on his way to his office in the posh district of Karachi.

Military sources said Hayat was unhurt but Hayat’s driver was among those killed when several assailants opened fire on the military convoy of seven to ten vehicles as it approached a road crossing in Clifton District.

One bomb was also thrown over the convoy which hit one of the military vehicle killing at least three army personnel riding it.

Major Gen Shaukat Sultan told reporters that seven army personnel and three policemen were killed in the attack. He said most of those killed were part of the general’s escort detail and were shot, along with some bystanders.

Emergency workers said the dead were six soldiers, three policemen and a civilian. Eight people were wounded.

This is the first assassination attempt of its kind in the troubled history of the city. Sultan said it was a terrorist attack but refused to link any group to it.

The attack came just six months after the army chief and president, General Pervez Musharraf, narrowly escaped two similar assassinations attempts blamed on senior Al-Qaeda leaders who allegedly planned these attacks through their diehard man in Pakistan known to agencies as Amjad Farooqi who once headed one of the banned militia outfits.

Police said at least three or four gunmen, who appeared highly trained, escaped in a car abandoned about 10 km (six miles) from the attack. They said they found a Kalashnikov rife, empty shells and a mask inside the car, Reuters said.

"It was a well-planned ambush," a senior military officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

‘Clashes’

Thursday’s attack coincided with renewed fighting this week between the military and Al Qaeda-linked militants near Wana, capital of a remote tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

The military said 20 militants were killed in the clashes near the mountain town of Wana that started on Wednesday, many of them foreigners, including Chechens and Uzbeks, Reuters said.

A security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said at least 15 security personnel had been killed, but the military declined to confirm this.

There was no apparent link between the two incidents, but several absconding members of militia organizations have in the past vowed to take “revenge” from the government functionaries for what they describe as killing of their fellow militants.

However, military spokesman refused to confirm or deny the involvement of Nek Muhammad, a tribal leader who had earlier threaten retaliation, in the attack.

Karachi has been rocked by a wave of violence in the past month in which more than 70 people have been killed. It has witnessed a crackdown against tribal militancy in which several hundred members of these groups have been killed or arrested since they were banned in 2001.

Thursday’s attack came just a day after a member of the ruling pro-military coalition was elected chief minister of Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital. His predecessor had resigned in the wake of bloodshed last month.

‘What happened’

Government officials said 20 suspected militants were killed while one injured militant was captured in the fighting. They said that the bodies of six suspected militants, believed to be foreigners, were retrieved till Wednesday evening.

"The militants have buried seven of their dead comrades in Shakai, while the rest of the bodies are lying in the dry river- bed that could not be retrieved because of fighting," one official source said.

At least three civilians, two men and a woman, were killed in crossfire when militants tried to force them out of a place to take up position there against the security forces. They belonged to the Khanokhel Mehsud tribe and were living in one of the three houses built underneath the Torwam bridge on the Tiarza-Luddah Road.

Locals in Tiarza, where one of the two attacks took place, said the casualty figure on both sides could be higher.

According to the official account, suspected militants launched simultaneous attacks on two military check posts about 10 kilometers apart at around 4.30am. But tribesmen said the fighting began after the militants had occupied one of the posts and the besieged soldiers called for reinforcements.

Brig Mehmood Shah, head of the security in Fata, told reporters the militants launched the attack with mortars, rockets and machine-guns on the military post on the Tiarza- Luddah Road near the recently-built Torwam bridge, about 20km to the west of Wana.

The other attack was launched almost simultaneously on a military post about 10km from the Torwam post, on the Wana-Inzar Road, about 25km to the west of Wana. Both the check posts served as entry points in the foothills of the Shakai valley, an area widely considered to be used as a hideout by hundreds of foreign militants.

Thousands of armed tribal volunteers, under pressure from the government, have been searching for foreign militants in Shakai for the last two days, but without any luck.

The lashkar abandoned its search on Wednesday following the twin-attack and returned to Wana. Tribesmen said the search was abandoned after local tribes refused to cooperate with the lashkar.

Accusations

A grand jirga of the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe has now been summoned at Azam Warsak on Thursday to discuss the situation and chalk out the future course of action.

The officials and top tribal militant Nek Muhammad were quick to accuse each other of violating the April 24 ‘rapprochement’ reached at Shakai that won amnesty for five top tribal militants including Nek, in return for a pledge to remain peaceful and not to use Pakistani soil against any other country.

The 27-year-old Nek and his four fellow clansmen have been accused by the authorities of harboring and helping foreign militants. A spokesman for the ISPR said in a statement that the government was following a political process to resolve the issue of foreign militants amicably and without using force.

"However, miscreants in an utter violation of the agreement and breach of trust, Muslim values, tribal customs and local traditions, resorted to unprovoked firing on the posts of the security forces.

"This should be an eye-opener for those who, oblivious of the ground realities, continue to maintain that there are no miscreants in the area," the statement concluded.

But Nek Muhammad in an interview with a foreign news organization hurled the same charge at the government. "It is the government which is committing excesses against our tribesmen and these attacks are the result of those excesses," he contended.

"If the government does not stop the operation there will be attacks in Peshawar, Islamabad and Karachi," Nek Muhammad warned.

Without accepting responsibility for the attacks, the tribal militant, who had once fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan, rebuffed the government’s claim regarding casualties among militants. "Only one of the mujahideen embraced martyrdom," he said.

Senior officials said that the foreign militants were still hiding in Shakai and the army was contemplating a major operation. "There will be a strong reaction," commented one senior official.

"The writ of the government will have to be established now. We have been befooling ourselves by trying to encourage lashkars and jirgas. The tribal institutions have weakened and eroded over the period," the official commented.

Locals in Shakai said that hundreds of families, with women and children, were moving to safe location for fear of a military operation in the area.

Airports On Alert

As news broke of the attack in Pakistan’s main port city of 14 million people, officials said Pakistan had placed its international airports at Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad on high security alert after intelligence reports of a hijacking threat.

"There is a high alert at the three international airports after hijacking threats," said Major Riaz Ahmad, a spokesman for the Airport Security Force. "We received some intelligence reports on hijacking last night and have beefed up security."

A security agency source said the alert was to ward off any retaliation to a military crackdown on foreign militants in the remote tribal region this week in which dozens have been killed.

Airports in Pakistan have been put on high security alert several times in the past year.