Pakistani police detained scores of people yesterday in connection with Tuesday’s attack on Sri Lanka’s cricket team in Lahore, but said they had made no progress in tracking down the gunmen that wounded nine people and killed seven others.
Senior police official Haji Habibur Rehman said police raided locations in Lahore and surrounding districts and arrested “some suspects.” He gave no details of their alleged roles, or the precise number detained, but said some were picked up at a Lahore hostel, where bloodstained clothes were also found after Tuesday’s attack.
Islamist militants are widely suspected to be behind the attack, but authorities have not explicitly stated this.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told Sri Lanka’s foreign minister that the “perpetrators of the heinous terrorist assaults on the Sri Lankan cricket team will be unearthed and dealt with iron hands,” according to a statement.
Up to 14 heavily armed gunmen sprayed the Sri Lankan team’s bus with dozens of bullets, plus rocket and grenade fire as it traveled to the Gaddafi Stadium for the continuation of the second test against Pakistan. Six police officers and a driver in the convoy were killed. Seven Sri Lanka players, a Pakistani umpire and a coach from Britain were wounded, none with life-threatening injuries.
The assault bore many similarities to last November’s three-day hostage drama in Mumbai that killed 170 people. Working in pairs, the attackers carried walkie-talkies and backpacks stuffed with water, dried fruit and other high-energy food — a sign they anticipated a protracted siege and may have been planning to take the players hostage, an official said.
None of the gunmen was killed, and all apparently escaped after a 15-minute gunbattle with the team’s security detail.
Journalists yesterday were shown weapons found at the scene and at other locations, including 10 AK-47 rifles, two rocket grenade launchers, 32 hand grenades and plastic explosives.
The Punjab provincial government took out advertisements in newspapers yesterday offering a US$125,000 reward. The ad showed two alleged attackers carrying backpacks and guns, taken from TV footage of the event.
Pakistan’s press yesterday blamed Pakistani Islamist militants and al-Qaeda for Tuesday’s attack, saying they had sounded “the requiem of cricket” in the country.
“Mumbai terror visits Lahore,” screamed the main headline in the country’s leading English language newspaper, Dawn, showing side-by-side photographs of gunmen from Tuesday’s attack in Lahore and from Mumbai.
The newspaper criticized the government’s policy of negotiating with militants in an attempt to neutralize extremist Islamist insurgencies along the country’s northwest border with Afghanistan.
The News pointed the finger at India in its main news story, but an editorial said the attackers were most likely “our own home-grown terrorist organizations” as there was no shortage of “highly competent, well armed and trained groups within our own borders capable of such operations.”
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