Militants unleashed coordinated attacks on Pakistani police in which 39 people died Thursday, storming offices in Lahore and bombing a northwest station to escalate 11 days of carnage.
The simultaneous assaults underscored the power of armed radicals to strike in the heart of Pakistan and the weakness of poorly equipped security forces, despite promises of a new offensive against the Taliban near the Afghan border.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan and is a key ally in the U.S.-led fight against terror, is reeling from Taliban-linked attacks in which more than 160 people have died since Oct. 5
Minutes apart, between 9:00 am and 10:00 am, gunmen armed with suicide vests and grenades stormed the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) branch in Lahore, plus a police training school and a commando academy on the city’s outskirts.
The training center in the suburb of Manawan was previously attacked on Mar. 30 in a militant raid that killed eight police recruits. And the FIA building in Lahore was bombed in March 2008, killing 16 people.
Pakistan’s weak civilian government said the country was facing a new war after a slew of militant attacks in the country’s political heartland of Punjab, away from the hotbed of insurgency in the northwest tribal region.
"They are involved in guerrilla war. First they were active in NWFP (North West Frontier Province), now they are engaged in Punjab. They are terrorists paid to destabilize Pakistan," Interior Minister Rehman Malik told reporters.
Even after the gunmen were overpowered and the death toll counted as 28, police warned against threats of more attacks in the country’s cultural capital where a string of high-profile militant attacks have taken place since March.
Among the dead, security officials identified 16 police and a civilian, and 10 attackers who were shot dead or blew themselves up.
Five attackers, including at least one teenager, scaled the back wall of the commando academy and security nerve center at Bedian, on the city’s outskirts, sparking a three-hour siege before the army announced it was in full control.
Officials said families who lived on the academy grounds locked themselves in to escape the crossfire in a sprawling compound covered with bushes and eucalyptus trees barely 10 kilometers (six miles) from the Indian border.
The attackers crept out of fields, four dressed in black uniform and one wearing traditional baggy trousers and shirt, said butcher Mohammad Ramzan.
Police officer Mohammad Azfar said one young gunman was shot in the head, and eight grenades were found on his body.
"He was 15-16 years old. He could not detonate his (suicide) jacket. He also had a packet of dates," Azfar said.
Authorities said they "averted major catastrophe", despite criticism that the government has no strategy to crush militants resurgent after the killing of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S. drone attack in August.
U.S. President Barack Obama is poised to sign a bill giving $7.5 billion to build schools, roads and democratic institutions in Pakistan as part of a strategy to discredit extremists in the nation and in Afghanistan.
In the northwest town of Kohat near Peshawar, police spokesman Fazal Naeem said 11 people were killed, including three policemen, also on Thursday.
Police said the bomber rammed a van into the outer wall of a police station in Kohat and that the building was badly damaged.
Later on, a car bomb ripped through a residential building for government employees in Peshawar, killing a child, officials said.
Last Friday, at least 52 civilians were killed when a suicide bomber blew up his car in a packed market in the city.
The following day, Taliban-linked gunmen staged an audacious raid on army headquarters near Islamabad with 23 people killed in a day-long siege that also saw 39 hostages freed by commando troops.
Speculation has intensified that the military is about to launch a ground offensive into the militant stronghold of South Waziristan.
Tens of thousands of people have fled and warplanes pounded suspected Taliban targets in the region Thursday, security officials and witnesses said.