Source: The Australian News

SHOOT-on-sight orders were issued to Pakistan’s security forces last night after suspected al-Qa’ida and Taliban-linked militants detonated a powerful bomb in the heart of the industrial zone in Karachi, the Islamic nation’s economic capital.

The attack - apparently aimed at further destabilising the country ahead of its imminent general election - came as opposition leader Nawaz Sharif launched a ferocious assault on army-backed President Pervez Musharraf, accusing him of following policies that have left Pakistan “drowned in blood”.

It also coincided with reports that a crisis management group in the Interior Ministry was tracking a hit squad of more than 300 al-Qa’ida- and Taliban-linked jihadi militants, some carrying suicide bomb jackets, who have reportedly targeted major political and religious leaders ahead of the slated February 18 poll.

Authorities said a group of 36jihadi terrorists had been seized in Faislabad and that others had been picked up in the Punjabi towns of Sargodha and Mianwali, all in areas previously considered to be far from the main hotbeds of militant insurgency closer to the border with Afghanistan.

Reports yesterday said the violence sweeping the country had erupted as Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency had lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it had nurtured since the 1980s.

Two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the intelligence agency told The New York Times that the militants had turned on their former handlers as the military had moved against them.

Joining with other extremist groups, the defecting militants had battled Pakistani security forces and helped carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, the report said.

The unusual disclosures regarding Pakistan’s leading military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, confirm some of the worst fears and suspicions of US and Western military officials and diplomats, the paper said.

One former senior Pakistani intelligence official, as well as other people close to the agency, told the paper the ISI led the effort to manipulate Pakistan’s last national election in 2002, and offered to drop corruption cases against candidates who would back Mr Musharraf.

A source close to the ISI told the paper Mr Musharraf had ordered the agency to ensure that the coming elections were free and fair, and denied the agency was working to rig the vote.

Another former senior intelligence official said dozens of ISI officers who trained militants had come to sympathise with their cause and had had to be expelled from the agency, the paper said. The source told the paper three purges had taken place since the late 1980s and included the removal of three ISI directors suspected of being sympathetic to the militants.

Mr Musharraf, who because of security fears rarely ventures outside Islamabad and the neighbouring, heavily-fortified garrison city of Rawalpindi, was in Karachi at the time of yesterday’s blast.

Officials said Mr Musharraf was nowhere near the scene of the carnage when a suicide bomber on a scooter blew himself up outside a garment factory crowded with workers. Fifteen people were killed and about 60wounded.

Analysts said the apparent intention of the bomber was to create more chaos in Karachi following the violence and unrest after Bhutto was assassinated on December 27.

Mr Musharraf, in Sindh for consultations with the provincial government over the widespread violence and rioting following Bhutto’s slaying, reacted furiously to news of the latest blast and announced he had issued shoot-on-sight orders against anyone seeking to derail the election.

Conceding that incidents of terrorism sweeping Pakistan had “broken the country’s backbone”, Mr Musharraf promised the Government would deal with the insurgency “effectively” and said that the jihadis would “not be allowed to take over Pakistan”.

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Tags: Al Qaida, Karachi, Militants, Musharraf, Taliban, terrorism