Gunmen opened fire on the motorcade of a Pakistani general in the volatile southern city of Karachi yesterday, killing at least four people and injuring 10 -- but failing to wound the general, police said.
Gunfire from buildings on both sides of the street hit the last vehicle in the convoy accompanying Lieutenant General Ahsan Saleem Hayat, the Karachi corps commander, near the city's Clifton Bridge. Soldiers returned fire, and the gunmen fled in at least one car, witnesses said.
PHOTO: AP
Hayat was unscathed, chief army spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said in the capital, Islamabad.
"He is safe. He's in his office, but his guard and driver are injured," Sultan said.
Mohammed Hussain, a police officer, said he had spotted a bag on the road after the attack and threw it into a vacant plot of land nearby, where it exploded, hurting no one but collapsing a 3m-high wall.
Security officials later saw another suspicious bag by the bridge and found a bomb inside. It was defused.
Hayat is the top military official in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city with 14 million people, which over the past month has been rocked by terrorist attacks and sectarian unrest that has killed dozens of people.
Karachi has been the scene of numerous bombings and shootings blamed on Islamic militants since President General Pervez Musharraf threw his support behind the US-led war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan in late 2001.
Syed Kamal Shah, the Sindh province police chief, said four people were killed in yesterday's attack, including a policeman, and five injured -- three policemen who were on routine patrols in the area, and two passers-by.
Military spokesman Idrees Malik said five army personnel inside the vehicle, which had no military markings, suffered multiple gunshot wounds. Soldiers in the convoy returned fire. The wounded were transferred to a military hospital in the city in critical condition, while the general traveled on to his office.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
The gunfire left apartments and shops on one side of the road pocked with bullet holes and shattered glass and bloodstains on the sidewalk. Investigators gathered empty submachine gun rounds.
Saif-ur Rahman, who lives in one of the apartments, said he saw four men fleeing in a gray colored car while shooting with AK-47 assault rifles.
"As I came out I heard gun fire. When I looked back I saw the men driving away in the car," he said.
Witnesses said there were at least three vehicles in the general's convoy. He usually travels in a limousine in a convoy of eight or 10 vehicles.
The first of three known assassination attempts against Musharraf since he took power five years ago was staged in Karachi in April 2002, when a car packed with explosives on his motorcade route failed to detonate because of a malfunction.
An Islamic extremist group, Harakat-ul Mujahidin al-Almi, was blamed for that attempt, and three of its alleged members have been convicted.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
OUTRAGE: The former strongman was accused of corruption and responsibility for the killings of hundreds of thousands of political opponents during his time in office Indonesia yesterday awarded the title of national hero to late president Suharto, provoking outrage from rights groups who said the move was an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses and corruption that took place during his 32 years in power. Suharto was a US ally during the Cold War who presided over decades of authoritarian rule, during which up to 1 million political opponents were killed, until he was toppled by protests in 1998. He was one of 10 people recognized by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in a televised ceremony held at the presidential palace in Jakarta to mark National
US President Donald Trump handed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a one-year exemption from sanctions for buying Russian oil and gas after the close right-wing allies held a chummy White House meeting on Friday. Trump slapped sanctions on Moscow’s two largest oil companies last month after losing patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his refusal to end the nearly four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. However, while Trump has pushed other European countries to stop buying oil that he says funds Moscow’s war machine, Orban used his first trip to the White House since Trump’s return to power to push for
LANDMARK: After first meeting Trump in Riyadh in May, al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House today would be the first by a Syrian leader since the country’s independence Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa arrived in the US on Saturday for a landmark official visit, his country’s state news agency SANA reported, a day after Washington removed him from a terrorism blacklist. Sharaa, whose rebel forces ousted long-time former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad late last year, is due to meet US President Donald Trump at the White House today. It is the first such visit by a Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946, according to analysts. The interim leader met Trump for the first time in Riyadh during the US president’s regional tour in May. US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack earlier
RSS