Suspects quizzed after blast at Islamabad airport

Pakistani investigators were yesterday quizzing two suspects after an Islamic militant was killed by his own hand grenade in a brazen attack on Islamabad international airport, officials said.

The attack late on Tuesday was the fifth in less than two weeks in Pakistan, raising fears that Taliban militants near the Afghan border are trying to embarrass Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a key US ally, for a military crackdown on their camps.

The two suspects and the attacker were in a car which drove to the airport carpark, where he exchanged gunfire with security forces, injuring three police, after they stopped him at a checkpost. He then died in the grenade blast.

"Two people arrested at the scene are being interrogated by a joint investigation team," said Saud Aziz, the police chief of Rawalpindi, a city adjoining Islamabad, where the airport is located.

"One of them says that he was just a driver and was hired from Golra More [an Islamabad suburb] to go to the airport," he said.

Investigators were trying to match the bomber's face with police records and had fingerprinted him, he said.

The bomber's corpse, with the legs mangled by the blast, was shown to reporters after the attack.

Officials hoped the suspects could provide leads to the group behind the attack amid fears the militants were increasingly "desperate" to send a message to military ruler Musharraf's government.

Pro-Taliban fighters last month vowed to avenge an airstrike on an alleged al-Qaeda camp in the South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan, which broke a nearly two-year truce between the government and militants.

"Links are pointing there, but we are still investigating," Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said when asked if investigations into the previous attacks had provided leads to militants in the tribal region.

Militants have opposed Musharraf since he ditched Pakistan's support for the Taliban regime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and launched a crackdown on extremism.

Musharraf, who arrived back in Pakistan at an adjoining military airbase hours after the attack -- returning from a trip to Iran and Turkey -- condemned the "terrorist" attack and praised the security forces for foiling it, state media reported.

The incident was no longer being considered a suicide attack because "when we searched the body we did not find any explosive belt on him," Sherpao said.

Instead, the militant armed with pistols and grenades likely planned a "hit and run attack" on crowds at the arrivals area, which failed when he panicked, said Brigadier Javed Cheema, head of the interior ministry's national crisis management cell.