At least 20 killed in attack on Pakistan police training centre

March 30

ATTACKERS armed with guns and grenades killed at least 20 policemen at a training centre in the Pakistani city of Lahore today.

A terror attack at a police training facility in Pakistan has killed eight police officers. 03/09...

Other police officials said the number of casualties may be higher given the heavy crossfire between the attackers holed up at the training centre and paramilitary troops who fanned around the perimeter of the ground.

“The number of killed is at least 20,” police sub inspector Amjad Ahmad told AFP outside the police training ground in Manawan. “The number of casualties may be more,” said police official Rias ad Bajwa.

Television footage showed bodies of policemen lying face down on the parade ground as heavy gunfire rattled out of the training ground at Manawan outside Pakistan's cultural capital Lahore.

Paramilitary soldiers, armed and wearing flak jackets and helmets, opened fire and fanned out around the perimeter of the site, which was surrounded by scores of police cars and armoured vehicles, an AFP reporter said.

Officials in Islamabad said the interior ministry chief was locked in an emergency meeting with senior police and security officials.

The attack came weeks after another attackers armed with guns and grenades mounted a coordinated assault on Sri Lanka's touring cricket team on March 3, killing eight people and wounding seven members of the squad.

Those attackers walked away unhindered by police and authorities have not announced any high-profile arrest in connection with the assault, which has at least temporarily ended Pakistani chances of hosting international sport.

Officials said that assault bore the hallmarks of the November 2008 attack on the Indian financial capital of Mumbai, which was blamed on Pakistan-based Islamic militants and killed 165 people.

Lahore is Pakistan's second largest city and capital of wheat-bowl Punjab province which also country's political nerve centre.

Extremists opposed to the Pakistan government's decision to side with the US in its “war on terror” have carried out a series of bombings and other attacks that have killed nearly 1,700 people in less than two years.

Much of the unrest has been concentrated in northwest Pakistan, where the army has been bogged down fighting Taliban militants and al-Qa’ida extremist

On Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a packaged mosque in a town in the northwestern tribal town of Jamrud, killing around 50 people.

US officials say northwest Pakistan has degenerated into a safe haven for al-Qa’ida and Taliban militants who fled the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and have regrouped to launch attacks on foreign troops across the border.

Such is the scale of extremist violence that US President Barack Obama has placed Pakistan at the heart of the fight against al-Qa’ida, tripling US aid to the nuclear-armed nation as part of a new strategy that also commits billions of dollars and thousands more troops to the Afghan war.

Mr Obama said al-Qa’ida and its allies were “a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within” and warned Islamabad to “demonstrate its commitment” to eliminating extremists on its soil.

Last month Zardari's government suspended Punjab's provincial assembly and administration, imposing central rule after a court ruling disqualifying its chief minister Shahbaz Sharif - brother of Pakistan's opposition leader Nawaz Sharif.

The governor who assumed administrative powers shuffled the bureaucracy and police in order to establish his hold, but critics say the hurried transfers undermined the security apparatus.

Source: The Australian

Nawaz Sharif defies house arrest

Pakistan's main opposition leader Nawaz Sharif has defied house arrest, ramping up his challenge to the government, as riot police clashed with stone-throwing mobs in street battles.

The former premier, now the most popular political leader in the country, led about 10,000 supporters in a banned protest in Lahore, from where he has urged thousands of activists to march on the capital Islamabad by Monday.

Sharif, locked in a standoff with President Asif Ali Zardari since the Supreme Court on February 25 barred him from running for office, is demanding the government reinstate judges deposed by ex-military ruler Pervez Musharraf.

'We don't accept this decision. The house arrest is illegal and immoral. All these decisions are unconstitutional,' he told a crowd after breaking his house arrest order.

'Come and join me. I am leaving the house. The time has come to march hand in hand.'

In the most violent scenes since the crisis began, riot police wearing body armour baton-charged protesters and fired tear gas.

Witnesses said more than a dozen people were wounded.

'The main GPO Square looked like a battleground. I saw at least two ambulances ferrying casualties to the hospital,' said resident Hanif Goraya, as Sharif supporters brought the city centre to a standstill.

'Police fired scores of shells, inside and outside the Lahore High Court building. A shell hit my left thigh, I received stitches. The injured include lawyers, political workers and some police officials,' he said.

At one point, crowds surged ahead of Sharif's convoy to mob two public transport buses blocking the route, forcing drivers to rescue the vehicles from being set alight, as a large police presence melted away.

His SUV inched through the streets and down The Mall of Lahore in a convoy of security vans, accompanied by private guards and supporters perched in vehicles and streaming behind on foot, an AFP reporter said.

'We tried our best to stop the crowd but they did not stop, Lahore city police chief Habib-ur Rehman says.

Nasir Zaidi, an intelligence official in Lahore, estimated that about 10,000 people were demonstrating in Lahore -- 3,000 outside the high court and the rest thronging behind Sharif, heading towards the court.

He was to address supporters in the city later on Sunday.

Facing the worst political crisis of his rule, Zardari has ordered a countrywide crackdown, banning protests, forcibly detaining activists and blocking provincial borders in a move that provoked concern in the West.

Soldiers armed with guns have sealed off the main entry into Islamabad from the garrison city of Rawalpindi, an AFP correspondent said.

The turmoil could not come at a worse time for the nuclear-armed Muslim nation, a central front in US President Barack Obama's fight against Islamist militancy and facing a wave of Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked violence.

About 1,800 activists have been arrested since Thursday, the vast majority in Sharif's stronghold of Punjab province where the chief lawyer fighting to reinstate the judges, Aitzaz Ahsan, was also detained, officials said.

Analysts warned that a reluctant military, which has ruled Pakistan for more than half its 62-year existence, would be forced to intervene.

'The situation is getting chaotic. It seems violence will take over and compel the army to intervene at some stage, defence and political analyst Talat Masood says.

'The army is extremely hesitant. But it is giving Zardari a firm message to come to terms with the opposition to avert violence,' he says.

The massively unpopular president, widower of assassinated former premier Benazir Bhutto, has also come under huge US pressure to end the standoff.

Late on Saturday he held out concessions, vowing to appeal against the court ruling that barred Sharif from office and pledging to restore the judges -- albeit without providing any dates or firm details.

Musharraf removed independent-minded chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and about 60 other judges in 2007, fearing that he would be declared ineligible to contest a presidential election while in military uniform.

The move triggered a countrywide protest, spearheaded by lawyers, that ultimately forced Musharraf to quit in August 2008.

Source: SkyNews

Pakistan's opposition leader Nawaz Sharif under house arrest

PAKISTANI police put the main opposition leader Nawaz Sharif under house arrest to foil an attempt to lead a protest march on Islamabad, a senior police official told AFP.

"Sharif has been ordered not to leave his house in Lahore for three days,'' police officer Ijaz Ahmed told AFP.

Similar restrictions have been imposed on several other opposition leaders including former cricketer turned politician Imran Khan and the main Islamist party Jamat-e-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed, he added.

Former prime minister Sharif said on Saturday that he would join a protest by lawyers pushing for the restoration of deposed judges and that he intended to lead the march from the eastern city of Lahore to Islamabad on Sunday.

Source: The Australian

Sharif in push for Taliban talks after UN rules out military action

Bruce Loudon, South Asia correspondent
October 08, 2008

FORMER Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif yesterday emerged in a key role in Saudi Arabian attempts to start peace talks with the Taliban, as momentum for negotiations was boosted further by a frank admission from the most senior UN official in Kabul that "we cannot win militarily".

"To those that talk about (the need for) a military surge (Isay) what we need is a political surge," top UN envoy Kai Eide said.

At the same time, the Pakistani official trying to talk peace with the jihadi militants, Afrasiab Khattak, warned that the situation in his country's highly strategic Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the springboard for much of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida militancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, "is just like Afghanistan was before 9/11 -- it is totally controlled by militants".

Mr Sharif, held in suspicion by Washington over an attempt when he was prime minister to impose shariah law in Pakistan and assume the Islamic caliphate-era title Ameer-ul-Momineen (Commander of the Faithful), was reported in Islamabad to be working with King Abdullah on a deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr Sharif has longstanding and close ties with King Abdullah as well as the Taliban. He has long been regarded as Riyadh's foremost ally in the region.

Reports said he had extended a visit to Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom's Government get negotiations under way following a four-day meeting in Mecca between Taliban members and Afghan government officials.

"Nawaz Sharif is serving as the bridge (in these talks)," a leading Pakistani newspaper reported last night.

But at the same time, one of Mr Sharif's senior MPs in Pakistan's national assembly, Rasheed Akbar Niwani, was targeted by a jihadi militant suicide bomber in an attack on his home in the Punjab province -- the third such attack in as many days.

Thirty people were killed and more than 75 -- including Mr Niwani -- were injured in the blast, which was blamed by police on Taliban militants nowoperating widely across the Punjab.

Today's closed-door parliamentary session will go ahead.

Peace talks with the militants, despite US objections, are now regarded as inevitable.

Most experienced analysts see coalition efforts in Afghanistan doomed to failure, largely because of the degree to which the Taliban and al-Qa'ida have been able to consolidate themselves in Pakistan's tribal belt.

King Abdullah has organised four days of meetings in Mecca involving a 17-member Afghan delegation that includes 11 Taliban delegates, two Afghan officials and representatives of the veteran former mujaheddin commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyr, who is closely identified with Iran.

The meeting aims to work towards a peace deal under which the Taliban would share power in Kabul.

Last night, it was disclosed that 50,000 Afghans have been earmarked by Pakistani authorities for expulsion from the al-Qa'ida and Taliban stronghold of Bajaur because of the belief that they are supporting the militants.

Source: The Australian

Sharif faces jail as Zardari's health claims questioned

Bruce Loudon, South Asia correspondent | September 04, 2008

TEN days after he split from Pakistan's ruling coalition, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif is again facing the prospect of prison after the National Accountability Bureau, now run by presidential frontrunner Asif Ali Zardari, reactivated corruption charges against him.

As it did so, a leading newspaper claimed Mr Zardari - set to be elected president on Saturday - had presented more than 200 medical certificates to various courts to delay corruption charges against him before he returned to the country last December.

The News said the NAB, controlled at the time by former president Pervez Musharraf, had questioned the authenticity of these certificates, including one stating that as recently as a year ago he was suffering from severe mental disorders, including suicidal tendencies.

The government at the time considered the certificates to be fake, according to the Pakistani daily, which quoted a source within the NAB as saying: "We wrote to the London High Court (where the certificates relating to Mr Zardari's alleged mental disorders had been filed) and told them that the government of Pakistan believes that the report was a case of perjury and meant to delay the proceedings in the corruption case."

London's High Court constituted an independent medical board to ascertain whether Mr Zardari really was suffering from psychological disorders, the paper reported.

But before it could meet, the NAB cell investigating Mr Zardari and his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, was closed last year after Mr Musharraf struck an agreement allowing Bhutto, then leader of the Pakistan People's Party, to return home from exile. Mr Musharraf granted an amnesty to Mr Zardari and Bhutto for all corruption charges brought against them.

The revelations have created new turbulence around his bid for the presidency in Saturday's election.

Unabashed, Mr Zardari has turned his sights on Mr Sharif in a move that could see his arch-foe removed from the political scene and returned to prison.

Mr Sharif, whose government was overthrown by a military coup led by Mr Musharraf, was spared a long prison sentence on corruption and tax evasion charges in 2000 following the intervention of the Saudi royal family. Instead he was exiled to the Saudi kingdom, where he stayed until his triumphant return last November.

Polls show Mr Sharif, who heads the Pakistan Muslim League (N) party, is far more popular than Mr Zardari, and analysts believe that if a national election were held now, the PPP would be hard-pressed to win.

By reactivating charges against Mr Sharif, Mr Zardari is seen to be returning Pakistan to the politics of retribution so prevalent in the early 1990s when their parties were fierce rivals.

A top Sharif aide, Ahsan Iqbal, said pursuing corruption cases against his leader "smacks of political bankruptcy".

"Sometimes if you cannot get things done politically, then you try to blackmail the opposition. I would still hope that the ruling party would refrain from such tactics."

Also yesterday, gunmen shot at a motorcade en route to pick up Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in an apparent assassination attempt.

Officials confirmed Mr Gilani was not in the vehicle when two bullets hit his armoured car in the garrison town of Rawalpindi.

Source: The Australian