Suicide bomber hits Pakistan police building

The attack in Peshawar added to growing fears of a bloody summer as Pakistani Taliban and other al-Qaida-linked groups carry out threats to avenge bin Laden’s killing.

Already this month, the Pakistani Taliban said it carried out three revenge attacks, including a deadly 18-hour siege of a naval base.

The bomber’s target today appeared to be a building belonging to the police’s criminal investigation department, but Pakistani army facilities are also nearby, said Liaquat Ali Khan, a senior police official in Peshawar.

Investigators with the counter-terrorism unit of the police were stationed at the centre, said Fayaz Khan Toru, the top police official in north-western Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

Police officer Mohammad Zahid was in the basement of the building when the bomb went off.

“I felt like the sky fell on me,” he said in hospital, where he was being treated for multiple injuries.

“The explosion jammed the door of my room in the basement, but there was a small hole in the wall so I crawled through that. When I got outside, there was lots of dust and smoke.”

Mr Khan said at least five people died and of the injured, four were in a serious condition. A handful of others were believed missing, possibly in the rubble of the collapsed building.

Military forces quickly sealed off much of the camp as machines were brought in to sift through the wreckage.

“Our determination is much higher than before, and we will fight till the defeat of these terrorists,” said Bashir Bilour, a senior official with the provincial government.

Bin Laden was killed on May 2 by a team of US Navy SEALs in the army town of Abbottabad, elsewhere in Pakistan’s north west and about a mile away from Pakistan’s premier military academy.

Since the raid, US-Pakistan relations have sunk to new lows. Pakistani leaders insist they had no idea the al-Qaida leader had been living, apparently for five years, in the large, three-storey house in Abbottabad. And they are furious that the US raided the house without telling them in advance.

The Pakistani Taliban is exploiting the tense relations by promising to attack both Western and Pakistani targets to avenge bin Laden’s death. The militant group has long despised the Pakistani government and army for their alliance with the US, a sentiment shared by many ordinary Pakistanis.

Since the bin Laden raid, the group has taken responsibility for a twin suicide bombing at a paramilitary police training centre that killed around 90 people and a car bomb that wounded two Americans in north-west Pakistan.

But the siege of the naval base in the southern port city of Karachi was easily one of the most audacious militant assaults in years and further rattled a military establishment already humiliated by the unilateral US raid.

The militants destroyed two US-supplied surveillance aircraft while killing 10 people on the base. Four militants were killed during the fighting, officials said.

There have been conflicting accounts of the number of insurgents involved - anywhere from six to 15. Pakistan security agencies are known to sometimes not give full accounts of terrorism incidents and often hold suspects for months without informing the public.

The fact that the attackers managed to infiltrate so deep into the high-security base led to speculation they may have had inside information or assistance. The military is not immune from the anti-Americanism and Islamism coursing through the country, especially in its lower ranks, and America’s raid against bin Laden has exacerbated anger among soldiers.

The naval base stand-off also revived international concerns over whether Pakistan’s estimated 100 nuclear weapons were safe from extremists. During a news conference yesterday in Kabul, Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen acknowledged the ongoing concerns about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

“Based on the information and intelligence we have, I feel confident that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is safe and well protected,” Mr Rasmussen said. “But of course, it is a matter of concern and we follow the situation closely.”