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Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Lahore ambush similar to Mumbai attacks

March 03 2009


Lahore - Pakistan said that Tuesday's ambush on the Sri Lankan cricket team bore all the hallmarks of the Mumbai attacks as the country speculated who could have been responsible for the brazen raid.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility and the gunmen fled after a furious shootout with Pakistani police, flinging open the doors to a host of possible culprits as the authorities launched a city-wide manhunt.

Officials and commentators alluded to extremists linked to Pakistan's Al-qaeda and Taliban infested northwest; Islamist groups spawned in Kashmir; Indian intelligence and Tamil Tiger separatists in Sri Lanka.

Pakistan denounced the attacks as the work of "terrorists," painting the nuclear-armed Muslim nation as a victim in the global "war on terror".


"The attack resembles the Mumbai attacks," Khaled Farooq, chief of police in Punjab province, told reporters in the eastern city of Lahore.

"That was also a commando action and this is also a commando operation," Farooq said referring to Mumbai, where gunmen killed 165 people last November.

New Delhi blamed that 60-hour siege on Pakistan's banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group, spawned from Pakistan's conflict with India over the fate of the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir.

But Farooq, the top police officer in Punjab which borders India, said the "attackers looked like Pashtuns" -- hinting that those behind the assault may have links to Pakistan's semi-autonomous and wild tribal areas.

More than 1 600 people have died in a wave of Islamist attacks in less than two years. Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants shelter in the northwest and more than 1,500 Pakistani security forces have been killed in the fight against extremists.

Political analyst Hasan Askari said he suspected internal militants trying to further destabilise the weak civilian government.

"Some of them may be doing such activities because they consider our government pro-India and pro-US," he told AFP.

"The attack was meant to embarrass Pakistan at an international level and show the world that these groups are powerful and the government is helpless."

The foreign ministry said the attack was "perpetrated by the enemies of Pakistan-Sri Lanka friendship" albeit providing no further details.

Sri Lanka is a major buyer of Pakistani arms, especially bullets and the defence relationship has been a source of friction in South Asia.

Pakistan has supported Colombo in its fight against the Tamil Tigers but both countries have troubled relations with regional power India.

Animosity towards nuclear rival India permeates the heart of Pakistan, particularly the powerful security establishment which has fought three wars with its eastern neighbour since independence from Britain in 1947.

"Our suspicion is that the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) could be behind it," one senior Pakistani security official told AFP.

"We have seen tit-for-tat attacks in both countries in the 1990s and Lahore could be a reaction to what happened in Mumbai, which India blamed on us," the official added.

India expressed "shock" at the attack and said Islamabad needed to "take meaningful steps" to dismantle terrorist groups.

In Sri Lanka, officials declined to speculate on suggestions that its own rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) may have been involved.

"We are uncertain as to who perpetrated this attack," Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona told AFP.

"I have heard the LTTE mentioned on the airwaves. There is considerable speculation, but we will await the outcome of the investigation before we comment," he said. - AFP

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