Friday 16 October 2009


COORDINATED ATTACKS UNLEASHED ON LAHORE

Omar Waraich

Time, October 16, 2009

The Pakistani Taliban dramatically escalated their wave of terror on Thursday, mounting five deadly gun and bomb attacks that killed a total 37 people and rattling the country in an apparent attempt to stave off an impending military offensive targeting its base in the mountainous wilds of South Waziristan. In the fifth day of bloodshed in the past 10 days, teams of well-trained gunmen trained their weapons on three high-profile law-enforcement buildings in Lahore, the cultural capital, in a sophisticated attack that chillingly resembled last November's assault on Mumbai.

Soon after 9am, groups of gunmen spilled over the walls of an elite police commando training facility in the Badian neighborhood in southern Lahore. As they emerged, clasping sophisticated weapons and carrying backpacks, two other groups of attackers did the same in two other locations. For the first time, they revisited targets they had assaulted before. In a brief attack on a police-training academy in Manawan, on the outskirts of the city, nine police officers and four militants were killed in the fighting. The same site was targeted using similar methods on March 30, leading to an eight-hour siege. This time, the police killed one of the gunmen, while three others killed detonated their suicide vests to evade capture.

Terror arrived in a different form at the offices of the Federal Investigation Agency (Pakistan's equivalent of the FBI), the same spot where a truck laden with a heavy payload of explosives slammed into the building, badly damaging its structure and killing 21 people in March 2008. Four government employees and a bystander were killed in the hour and half long siege that ended with the death of two attackers.

(...) [artículo aquí]

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