Pakistan grills siege suspects

PAKISTAN: Pakistan interrogated Tuesday four suspects, including an Afghan, captured during a police academy siege that has fanned Western fears about the menace of extremism in the nuclear-armed state.

Attackers armed with guns, grenades and suicide vests stormed the training centre near Pakistan's cultural capital Lahore unleashing nearly eight hours of gunbattles until they were overpowered by security forces. Eight police cadets and four attackers died in the second commando-style assault in Lahore this month, sparking fears that violence is seeping out of the tribal badlands on the Afghan border and into the heart of Pakistan.

Such is the scale of unrest in the frontline state of the "war on terror" that US President Barack Obama called Al-Qaeda and its allies "a cancer that risks killing Pakistan" and urged Islamabad to eradicate extremists.

"Police and other intelligence agencies are interrogating the suspects. We cannot say anything for now about which group is involved," Lahore city police chief Habib-ur Rehman told AFP.

Authorities have spearheaded a top-level investigation, with homegrown Islamist groups or radicals holed up on the border with Afghanistan the chief suspects.

Lahore,Tuesday, AFP