Suicide Bomber Attacks Pakistani Air Force Complex - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide bombing at Pakistan’s premier aeronautical manufacturing complex killed seven people on Friday morning. It was one of a string of attacks on major government installations this month.

The bomber blew himself up at the checkpoint at the entrance to the complex, 40 miles northwest of Islamabad, as workers arrived for the morning shift, said a district police official, Fakhur Sultan.

Two men guarding the checkpoint and five civilians were killed, Mr. Sultan said. The Pakistan Aeronautical Complex at Kamra is the country’s main air force maintenance and research hub, where engineers and workers build and overhaul fighter jets and radar systems.

The relentless assaults against sensitive and prominent targets in Pakistan come as the army is conducting a major offensive against militants from the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the remote tribal area of South Waziristan. The attacks are seen as reprisals by the militants.

On Thursday morning, a senior army officer, Brig. Moinuddin Haider, was assassinated by two gunmen who attacked his jeep during rush-hour traffic in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

The Taliban had warned before the start of the campaign in South Waziristan that they planned to attack Pakistan’s military assets.

The Taliban attacked the headquarters of the Pakistani Army, in Rawalpindi, in a commando-style raid on Oct. 10. The insurgents took more than 40 civilians and soldiers hostage for 20 hours, and more than 20 people were killed in the siege.

With the military nearing the end of its first week of fighting in South Waziristan, some military reports said Friday that soldiers had captured the strategic town of Tor Ghundai on the southeast axis of the army’s assault path.

Elsewhere, at least 16 people were killed when a minibus hit an antitank mine on Friday in the tribal area of Mohmand, bordering Afghanistan, district officials said.

“It was an antitank mine, and consider the damage it would have caused to a minibus,” a senior official in Mohmand said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “There have been few survivors.” Among the dead were four women and two children.

He said that the area was under the control of militants, and that troops from the government’s paramilitary Frontier Corps had begun an operation to flush them out of the area. “It seems that the militants had planted the mine to stop the advancing forces,” he said.

Six people wounded in the minibus explosion were taken to Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, where there was another attack on Friday. Militants set off a car bomb in the parking lot of a banquet hall in Peshawar, wounding 10 people, district officials said.

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.