LAHORE, Pakistan, (Reuters) – Militants launched a string of attacks in the Pakistani heartland and in the troubled northwest yesterday, killing 31 people after a week of violence in which more than 100 people died.
The attacks on police in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, and a car bomb in Kohat in the northwest, come ahead of an expected military offensive against the Taliban in their South Waziristan stronghold on the Afghan border.
Later, a car bomb was set off by remote control in a neighbourhood where government workers live in the northwestern city of Peshawar killing a child and wounding about a dozen people, police said.
The violence, just days after a daring raid on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, underscored the risk posed by militants to Punjab, Pakistan’s most economically important province and the country’s traditional seat of power.
“First the (North West) Frontier province was on the front line, now they are playing their games in Punjab,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Geo television.
The government says most attacks are plotted in South Waziristan and carried out by Taliban, often with the help of allies from militant groups based in Punjab province.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan is under U.S. pressure to crack down on Islamist militancy as President Barack Obama considers a boost in troop numbers fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Ten gunmen, some of them teenagers, were killed in the attacks on three police centres in Lahore.
Seven people, including a gunman, were killed at a regional headquarters of the police’s Federal Investigation Agency. One gunman escaped and one was captured, security officials said.
A suicide car-bomber attacked the same building in March last year killing 21 people.
Gunmen also attacked two police training centres, one a training school attacked this year and the other an elite police academy set in fields in the city outskirts.
Eleven police, six of them recruits, and four gunmen were killed at the Manawa training centre, police said. Three of the black-clad attackers blew themselves up.
A policeman, a civilian and five gunmen were killed at the academy. Three gunmen blew themselves up and two, including one who was about 16, were shot by snipers, police said.