Strugling Eight killed in Pakistan shrine bombing

Eight killed in Pakistan shrine bombing

KARACHI — Two bombs ripped through a Sufi shrine in Karachi killing at least eight worshippers, including two children, as Pakistan battles a wave of violence linked to Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists.
Senior police official Hamid Parhial said 65 people were also wounded in the suspected suicide attack late Thursday in Karachi, a teeming port city that is a maelstrom of communal and criminal violence.

The bombs exploded at the entrance of the shrine to Abdullah Shah Ghazi, a saint in the Sufi mystical strain of Islam, as devotees packed it for a weekly gathering in the city’s seaside Clifton district.

Witness Gul Mohammad said he was outside the shrine when two huge blasts were heard in quick succession. “I rushed inside and saw blood and human flesh,” he said.

“Some bodies were lying on the ground and several people wounded in the blasts were crying in pain. Then ambulances started arriving and moving the injured to hospitals.”

Doctor Seemin Jamali of Civil Hospital Karachi said 10 women and seven children with serious injuries were among those admitted.

“It was a terrorist attack,” said Sindh provincial home minister Zulfikar Mirza, who said the government had decided to seal all shrines in the city immediately over security fears.

A bomb attack in July at a popular Sufi site in the eastern city of Lahore killed more than 40 people. Militant Islamists see visits to Sufi shrines and some rituals as un-Islamic.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the Pakistani Taliban has been blamed for similar bombings in the past.

More than 3,700 people have been killed in a series of suicide attacks and bombings, many of them carried out by the Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked extremists, in Pakistan during the past three years.

The United States, whose intensifying drone strikes against Islamist militants in northwest Pakistan have raised tensions with Islamabad, condemned the attack.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Washington stood “shoulder-to-shoulder with Pakistan in its struggle against terrorism”.

The United States has dramatically increased drone strikes against militants in the lawless tribal areas allegedly at the centre of a plot to carry out Mumbai-style attacks on European cities.

On Sunday, the United States warned that its citizens may be at risk of terrorist attacks while travelling in Europe, followed by similar alerts from Britain, Japan and Sweden.

Pakistan’s ambassador to Britain however said Washington’s alert may have been politically motivated, ahead of mid-term US elections next month.

“I will not deny the fact that there may be internal political dynamics, including the forthcoming mid-term American elections,” High Commissioner Wajid Shamsul Hasan was quoted as saying in Friday’s Guardian newspaper.

“If the Americans have definite information about terrorists and Al-Qaeda people, we should be provided (with) that and we could go after them ourselves.”

Hasan further said recent US attacks inside Pakistan had “set the country on fire” and warned that mounting public anger could lead to American personnel in Pakistan being attacked.

“There is a figure that there are 3,000 American personnel in Pakistan. They would be very easy targets.”

Pakistan’s US envoy had said Wednesday the increased drone strikes were linked to the alleged European terror plot.
coppied by http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle08.asp?xfile=data/international/2010/October/international_October309.xml§ion=international

Insurgent Militants kill eight policeman in Northern Afghanistan

Militants kill eight policeman in Northern Afghanistan

Insurgents killed eight Afghan policemen in a raid this morning on a checkpoint outside the northern city of Kunduz, the provincial chief of police said.

Abdul Raziq Yaqoubi said police suspected the raid was carried out by militants from Russia's restive Chechnya region who are active in the surrounding province, also called Kunduz.

More than 10 militants took part in the attack, two or three of whom were believed to have been wounded when the police fought back, Yaqoubi said.

The militants apparently hoped to steal the policemen's weapons, but were beaten back before they could do so, he said.

Kunduz has seen an increasing number of attacks on Afghan and foreign coalition forces who rely on a supply line running south through the province from neighboring Tajikistan. Foreign fighters from Chechnya, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf are smuggled into the area over the rugged mountainous border with Pakistan to the east.

Also Wednesday, investigations continued into an infiltration attack at a coalition base in the northwestern province of Badghis in which two Spanish police trainers and their Iranian-born Spanish translator were killed.

Spain's Interior Ministry says the officers' driver opened fire on the men during a training exercise Wednesday morning. The driver was killed shortly afterward in a hail of gunfire.

Spain's interior minister, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, described the incident as a "terrorist attack."

"I can't say if the Taliban were behind this or not," he told reporters in Madrid. "But what is clear is that it was a premeditated attack. The person who opened fire knew exactly what he was doing."

Perez Rubalcaba said the assailant had worked with the Spanish Civil Guard, a paramilitary force, since the unit arrived in Afghanistan five months ago to train Afghan police.

After word of the shooting spread, several hundred angry men gathered outside the walls of the Spanish compound, shouting "Allahu Akbar," or God is Great, hurling stones and ripping down fences around the installation, Associated Press Television video showed. At least one vehicle was torched and gunshots were fired, although it was unclear who was shooting.

Provincial health director Abdul Aziz Tariq said 25 people were wounded in the protest, most of them by bullets, with two in critical condition. Seven of those hospitalized were under 18 years old but their wounds were not life threatening, he said.

The protest underscored the brewing resentment among many Afghans over the presence of foreigners on their soil, further encouraged by the insurgents as a way of turning the population against the national government in Kabul.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility from the Taliban on either incident.

Meanwhile, NATO reported that three Afghan civilians were killed Wednesday by a homemade bomb in southern Kandahar province's Arghandab district, a Taliban stronghold that has seen a growing coalition presence.

Two Taliban commanders were also killed Wednesday in fighting with a joint Afghan-Taliban force in neighboring Uruzgan province, along with 12 regular insurgent fighters, the Afghan National Police reported. Four insurgents were captured in the operation, the police said.

One Taliban fighter and one policeman also died in a shootout in Helmand province to the west, it said.
coppied by http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/militants-kill-eight-policeman-in-northern-afghanistan-2062568.html