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.
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