Assault leaves authorities struggling for answers

LAHORE - The parade ground was still sodden from overnight rain but their instructors were in no mind to cancel the morning's drill.

So, from 7am, Azhar Abbas and his fellow police cadets had been undergoing inspection. Twenty minutes later, chaos broke out.

"One grenade was thrown by the terrorists and then they were firing their guns indiscriminately across the parade ground," recalled the shaken young man. "That was when someone shouted 'Save your lives'. There was a wall, and we ran to it. We tried to save ourselves."

Abbas was one of around 700 recruits inside the Manawan police training centre on the outskirts of Lahore when a group of gunmen, armed with automatic weapons and bags of grenades, stormed the compound and launched an attack that has raised the stakes once again in Pakistan's battle with the militants.

The bloodshed could have been much worse - eight police cadets are thought to have been killed and 90 injured - but the eight-hour siege marked another disturbing development in the militants' tactics.

Coming just three weeks after gunmen tried to hijack the Sri Lankan cricket team in the same city, yesterday's brazen assault has left authorities struggling to know how to protect locations that, until now, have barely been considered targets.

Last night the chief of the Pakistan Taleban, Baitullah Mehsud, told Reuters that his group had carried out the attack. "Yes, we have carried out this attack. I will give details later."

Pakistan's Interior Ministry chief, Rehman Malik, had said earlier that he believed the gunmen were linked to Mehsud.

Some of the cadets said they heard gunmen speaking with accents from the southern Punjab, raising the prospect of a nexus between militants in Pakistan's tribal areas and those from the largest and wealthiest province. Malik also suggested the gunmen may have been members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Punjab-based group said to have links to al Qaeda.

Precisely how many gunmen were involved remains unclear. Four are thought to have been killed, with at least two of them blowing themselves up as the Pakistani security forces closed in. Another militant - said to be an Afghan national - who may have been co-ordinating the attack from outside the compound, was captured alive. Two more possible suspects were being interrogated.

Witnesses said that the group of men had been dropped by a white van outside the academy. The academy, just 16km from the Indian border, is not heavily defended. The gunmen simply leaped over the low perimeter wall, throwing grenades and firing their weapons.

Trainee Gozel Ansari, who started his induction just six weeks ago, was on the rear parade ground.

"Suddenly there was a loud bang and we heard a series of three blasts. We asked the instructors what was happening. Suddenly the security guards appeared, saying that we were being attacked. We ran into a corner near the toilets and hid. The bullets were passing over our heads. We felt that any moment we could die."

As Ansari and his colleagues huddled between two buses, the gunmen stepped over the bodies of the dead cadets sprawled on the parade ground, entered the academy and made their way upstairs. From the rooftop they continued to fire. An ambulance arrived and was swiftly targeted. When the first 12-strong group of police commandos turned up, six of their weapons jammed and they had to leave to re-arm, according to a police inspector at the scene.

Reinforcements arrived later from paramilitary troops, complete with armoured personnel carriers and a surveillance helicopter, and a sustained gun fight began with the militants, who by now had taken up positions on the second floor.

The walls of the academy, both inside and out, were pock-marked with bullet holes while empty cartridge shells littered the parade ground, on which still lay the berets of half a dozen cadets. The worst of the fighting was in a second-floor dormitory where three gunmen were making their last stand, holding cadets hostage.

Police said they were able to shoot one of the militants. But surrounded and trapped, two militants decided to take their own lives, setting off suicide bomb belts. Police and forensics experts were yesterday working their way through the dormitory looking for clues.

Police and commandos celebrated the end of the siege by firing into the air, shouting "God is great".

Their operation had been judged a success; none of their officers killed, the hostages rescued unharmed.

But with the surging militancy again flexing its muscles - this time just days after President Asif Ali Zardari promised his country would not become a haven for terrorists - Pakistan may have little reason to cheer.

- INDEPENDENT