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Pakistan was on high alert yesterday after a warning by intelligence agencies that homegrown Taliban might be planning the “biggest ever” attack in major cities, officials said. |
Prisons, airports, top political leaders, Western embassies and military installations were the likely targets, officials said, days after Islamist militants staged a jailbreak in a north-western city to free Taliban detainees.
Elite commandos from anti-terror police were combing the Margalla Hills overlooking the capital Islamabad, fearing the thickly forested mountains could provide militants with a launch pad for attacks on the city.
“Our men are searching through the hills,” said Sikandar Hayat, Islamabad police chief. “We have a very specific threat.”
He said militants were planning to attack “sensitive buildings” on Constitutional Avenue, the city’s main boulevard.
The Presidential Palace, the prime minister’s secretariat and residence and a fortified walled enclave housing embassies are located on the road in the foothills of Margalla.
Hayat said militants wanted to attack some “high-value” targets but did not say if the president or the prime minister were among them.
“We are on red alert for an indefinite period. It is the highest level of security,” the police chief said amid a global warning of possible Al Qaeda attacks.
Authorities in the southern province of Sindh called in commandos from a paramilitary force to secure jails in Hyderabad and Sukkur towns, said one official who declined to be named.
Paramilitary rangers were deployed to reinforce police at the airport in Islamabad after intelligence agencies discovered a Taliban plot to storm the facility in a commando-style assault and blow up planes.
A police spokesman in Islamabad did not confirm whether anybody was arrested in a search that was launched on Sunday and was ongoing.
Meanwhile, a bomb exploded on a passenger train in central Pakistan yesterday, killing a toddler and wounding 13 others, officials said, in what the railways minister called “an act of terrorism”.
The device on the Shalimar Express from the eastern city of Lahore to Karachi went off as it passed through fields near the town of Toba Tek Singh in Punjab province.
“It was an act of terrorism. The explosive was planted in the washroom of a bogie (wagon),” railways minister Saad Rafique told reporters in Lahore.
“Fourteen people have been injured, condition of three of them are critical.”
Mohamed Hussain, medical superintendent in main Toba Tek Singh hospital sai that a child, aged two and a half years, had succumbed to his injuries in hospital.
Shehzad Asif, district police chief confirmed the death and said that bomb disposal experts and police investigators were still on site and examining the “remnants and broken pieces of the explosive material”.
TV footage showed the explosion had damaged the roof of the carriage but not forced the train off the rails, suggesting a relatively low-intensity blast.
Farah Masood, a senior government official in Lahore, confirmed that a locally-made explosive device was used in the explosion and that 14 people had been injured.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast.
Pakistan is battling a homegrown Islamist insurgency and faces near-daily bombings and shootings in the troubled northwest, but attacks on the railway are relatively rare.
A bomb near the waiting lounge for the luxury Lahore-Karachi Business Express train last year killed two people.