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Pakistani police probe attacks

Police opened an investigation into twin suicide attacks in Pakistan's cultural capital that killed 24 people ahead of a transfer of power to followers of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, a top investigator said yesterday.

The bombings in Lahore on Tuesday were the first major acts of terrorism since former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party announced over the weekend they would form a coalition government aimed at reducing the powers of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

The blasts happened about 15 minutes apart in different districts of Lahore, Sharif's stronghold. The first tore the facade from the seven-story Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) building as staff were beginning their work day.

Yesterday, Tasadaq Hussain, a senior police investigator, said police collected remains of the two suicide attackers and efforts were under way to trace and capture those who orchestrated the attacks.

He provided no further details.

Lahore Police Chief Malik Mohammed Iqbal said an explosives-packed vehicle managed to penetrate security, drive into a parking lot and detonate close to the FIA building -- which houses part of the federal police's anti-terrorism unit -- devastating offices on the lower floors and blowing out the walls around a stairwell.

Grainy footage from a surveillance camera shown on the private Aaj television channel showed the small truck running over a guard and barreling through the gate seconds before the blast.

While al-Qaeda-linked militants in Iraq have regularly used vehicles to launch massive attacks on buildings, such damage has rarely been inflicted on a government building in Pakistan.

Also yesterday, two bomb disposal experts died in the northwestern valley of Swat while defusing a bomb they found on a road, said Mohib Ullah, a local police official. He said they were dispatched to the area after residents alerted police about the bomb.

Musharraf quickly condemned Tuesday's bombings.

The president said in a statement the government would continue to fight terrorism "with full force."

But some enraged Lahore residents blamed Musharraf. They gathered in small groups on Tuesday on the city's main Mall Road, chanting "Musharraf is a dog! Musharraf is a pimp!"

In addition to the 24 killed, officials said more than 200 people were wounded. Doctors at Lahore hospitals said the dead included a three-year-old girl and that 32 girls were injured by flying debris at a nearby Roman Catholic elementary school.

The second blast all but flattened the office of an advertising agency in the affluent Model Town neighborhood about 24km away. Police said two children and the wife of the house's gardener were killed in that explosion.

Officials declined to speculate about whether the Lahore residence of Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, located less than 50m away, was the intended target of the attack.

Musharraf is expected to transfer power to the new government this month.
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