Terror strikes Lahore again

Militants unleashed coordinated attacks on Pakistani police in which 39 people died yesterday, storming offices in Lahore and bombing a northwest station to escalate 11 days of carnage.

Minutes apart, between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. gunmen armed with suicide vests and grenades stormed the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) branch in Lahore, plus a police training school and a commando academy on the city’s outskirts.

“They were very young 19 to 20 years old. Three of them were clean shaven and one had a small beard,” Dildar Hussain, a 21-year-old police recruit told AFP from his hospital bed with arm and collar bone fractures.

The training centre in the suburb of Manawan was previously attacked on March 30 in a militant raid that killed eight police recruits. And the FIA building in Lahore was bombed in March 2008, killing 16 people.

Among the dead, security officials identified 16 police and a civilian, and 10 attackers who were shot dead or blew themselves up. AFP