By Muhammad Najeeb, IANS
Islamabad : At least 28 people, including 19 army personnel, were killed and more than 70 injured in two suicide bomb attacks Tuesday in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi – first on a bus carrying soldiers and the second at a busy market place.
The first blast occurred when a person on a motorcycle hit a bus carrying 45 soldiers in Rawalpindi Cantonment area to work at 7.10 in the morning.
Seventeen people, all from the army, died on the spot while the injured, including some passers-by, were shifted to nearby military hospitals. Just five minutes later, a second blast occurred in R.A. Bazaar, killing eight people on the spot while three died in hospital.
The bus was completely destroyed in the blast. Rescue workers had to cut open the wreckage to pull out the dead and injured.
It was not clear if any soldiers were killed in the second blast. Some unconfirmed reports said the 17 killed in the first blast were civilian employees of the Pakistan Army while others said the bus was carrying employees of Pakistan military’s premier intelligence agency ISI or Inter-Services Intelligence.
However, Interior Ministry spokesperson Javed Iqbal Cheema denied both the reports, saying they were employees of the defence ministry and other various government departments. The bus had a civilian number.
Cheema said only 25 people had died and 68 were wounded and initial investigations indicated that the bombings were suicide attacks. He said authorities were examining whether Tuesday’s attacks were linked to two suicide attacks in Islamabad in July that killed 31 people.
The incident occurred when President Pervez Musharraf’s key military and civilian aides are negotiating a deal with exiled opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in Dubai to prolong military dictatorship in the country.
Musharraf, who is in power since 1999, is in severe crisis since he challenged the superior judiciary earlier this year and ordered military action against students of a mosque for launching a campaign for Islamic rule in the country. In the last two months, at least 16 blasts have been reported in the country in which more than 225 people have been killed. These include two bomb attacks in the federal capital.
Rawalpindi has also seen several attacks, including two huge bombs aimed at Musharraf that killed at least 16 people in December 2003.
Tuesday’s attack was in the high security zone and only a kilometre from the army headquarters. There are several army installations close to the site.
An eyewitness appearing on a local television channel said the bomb exploded when the bus was waiting in the traffic, filling it with flames. “The roof of the bus was blown away. Pieces of other people’s flesh hit my head and covered my clothes,” he said from a city hospital bed, where he was being treated for a minor head injury.
The military government in Pakistan backed by the Bush administration has also launched a crackdown in tribal areas of Pakistan against the Taliban that is allegedly hiding on this side of the Pak-Afghan border. Religious Affairs Minister Ejaz-ul Haq said the attacks could be a reaction to the war in Afghanistan and Pakistani operations against militants in their strongholds near the Afghan border.
A rocket attack on a checkpoint in the South Waziristan border region killed one soldier and wounded four Tuesday, a local intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. Local militants say they abducted scores of Pakistani troops in the same region last week.
“This is all probably because of the situation presently in Afghanistan and in Waziristan,” Haq said on Dawn News television. “We are the frontline state in the war against terror, and we are suffering the most.”