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| India-Pakistan |
| Suspicions grow that attack was 'inside job' |
| 2009-03-05 |
| Dramatic footage showing the alleged perpetrators of Tuesday's audacious attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team making their getaway was released by a Pakistani news channel last night. The grainy images, captured by four CCTV cameras minutes after the ambush, show the gunmen strolling calmly through the back streets of Liberty Market just before 9am. In one sequence, three of the men walk down a narrow, deserted street, carrying heavy bags and with weapons slung over their shoulders. They then mount a waiting motorcycle and speed away. Yesterday, police released "wanted" posters bearing sketches of the suspects. Up to 14 masked gunmen took part in the attack on the Sri Lankan team's tour bus at the Liberty Square roundabout in the heart of Lahore. They opened fire on the bus, killing a driver and six police officers escorting the Sri Lankans. Six players and two assistant coaches were wounded. President Asif Ali Zardari has vowed the attackers will be caught and punished "with iron hands", but as detectives searched for clues to the whereabouts of the fugitives, the Lahore police commissioner Khusro Pervez confessed there had been "major security lapses". There was also confusion yesterday as officials made contradictory claims about the arrests so far. Mr Pervez said "some suspects" had been detained but that was denied by another senior officer. Meanwhile, the Punjab government offered a 10 million rupee (£88,000) reward for information leading to the gunmen. The Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said officials were pursuing "important leads" and the government had "constituted a special team of investigators". Opposition MPs and many in the Pakistani media have seized on the government's floundering and accused it of glaring intelligence failures. The Sri Lankan team agreed to tour Pakistan after being assured they would receive security equal to that given to the President. Instead, the authorities failed to take crucial measures to protect the squad. Their bus was accompanied by only two police vans, when it should have been boxed in on all four sides. Only the windscreen was bullet-proofed, and the driver was using the same vehicle and following the same route from the team's hotel to the cricket ground for the third day in a row. No attempt was made to block traffic or line the route with police. "There was no outer cordon," Mr Pervez admitted. "When they were escorted, the [police] vehicles used were not the appropriate vehicles." The numerous failings fuelled speculation that the attack might have been, at least in part, an "inside job". In previous terror attacks in Pakistan, the perpetrators appeared to have considerable intelligence about their targets. Car bombers have struck at army and anti-terror police headquarters in the past two years without the slightest hindrance. The commando-style raid in Liberty Square drew comparisons with last November's attacks in Mumbai, India, which were blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba group and other jihadist organisations which were deployed as proxies by the army to fight in Indian-administered Kashmir. The government has so far declined to acknowledge the possibility that Pakistani militants might have been involved. Rehman Malik, the chief interior ministry adviser, has claimed "a foreign hand" lay behind the attack on the cricketers – which has been widely interpreted as pointing the finger at neighbouring India. Some Pakistani newspapers have suggested that the Indian intelligence service was involved, while others have urged Pakistani leaders to shed their differences and unite in a common effort to tame rising militancy and terrorism. "Politicians need to wake up, bury the hatchet in the national good and rout the real enemy," said an editorial in the English-language daily, Dawn. In Lahore yesterday, a stream of mourners gathered at the scene of the attack to lay flowers near a sign saluting the bravery of a slain traffic police officer, Tanveer Iqbal. |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #9 Memo to self: Read Asia Times regularly. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2009-03-05 21:32 |
| #8 Pakistan has become the center of focus for all the terrorist-related sh$$ anywhere in the world except Somalia, and I wouldn't be surprised to see their hand in the piracy there. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2009-03-05 13:46 |
| #7 Everyone go read the article at Frozen Al's link. Lots of red meat in there. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2009-03-05 11:44 |
| #6 Asia Times says terrorists wanted to capture cricket team and exchange them for prisoners. The militants, working directly under the command of a joint Punjabi and Kashmiri leadership based in the North Waziristan tribal area and allied with al-Qaeda, planned the Lahore operation. The object was to hold the cricketers ransom in exchange for jailed militants and the safe passage of their colleagues to North Waziristan. Inspector General Khawaja Khalid Farooq of the Punjab police said the militants were carrying sufficient weaponry to fight for many hours. They also had plentiful supplies of food, such as almonds and mineral water. Video footage of the incident shows the gunmen as ... dressed in urban attire, including running shoes - nothing like the rustic mountain-dwelling Taliban fighters who invariably wear traditional clothing such as turbans, long robes and sandals. All indications are that the militants are ... trained by Pakistan's premier secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence's India cell to fight against the Indian security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir. These "Kashmir" militants are mostly ethnic Punjabis. The attack on Tuesday is most likely related to events in the Swat Valley, where the government last month signed a peace treaty with militants after several years of fighting. ... The government accepted all of the demands, but it refused to release those prisoners who were not from Swat. The Punjabi militants were clearly upset at having their demands rejected, while the Pashtuns got what they wanted. The attack in Lahore was meant to redress the "injustice". |
| Posted by: Frozen Al 2009-03-05 11:22 |
| #5 Maybe they _wanted_ to kill some cops. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2009-03-05 09:58 |
| #4 The police escort died, not the players or the umpires I too found that funny. Why not fire at the player's bus first? Why didn't they use RPGs to set it afire? Also despite not being pursued and being able to calmaly withdraw they let lots of weapons behind them. |
| Posted by: JFM 2009-03-05 08:52 |
| #3 Occams Razor says the reason none of the Sri Lankans were killed was spray and pray marksmanship. Also the Sri Lankans had had briefings or training on what to do in this kind of situation |
| Posted by: phil_b 2009-03-05 08:07 |
| #2 Another thing. A 30 minute attack? They had to be utter incompetants OR were making a largely noisy symbolic attack. Guys, it does not take long for ambushers to effectively engage their target. Ambushes cause the majority of their casualties in the first minute. The fact that the players were not slaughtered means, to me, that they were not the target and were not intended to die. The police escort died, not the players or the umpires. So the target was likely the police. Put those pieces together. |
| Posted by: Whiskey Mike 2009-03-05 07:21 |
| #1 Suspicions? When you have a firefight for half an hour, that this firefight takes place not in the desert of Gobi but in the centre of Lahore and in half an hour no reinforcements reach the scene, the only possible explanations are abject cowardice or the soldiers and policemen nearby having orders to look the other way. |
| Posted by: JFM 2009-03-05 06:44 |