Militants attack 3 police sites in Lahore, Pakistan

Militants struck targets across Pakistan on Thursday, killing at least 26 people, including 14 in nearly simultaneous attacks on police buildings in Lahore that demonstrated an ability to hit key state security installations seemingly at will.

The Lahore raids on three security compounds, in which nine militants died, were the latest in a wave of attacks that has targeted United Nations offices, markets and police facilities, leaving scores dead.

The violence in Pakistan’s major cities threatens to undermine the public confidence that the government and military have won with an operation that flushed Taliban militants out of urban areas in the restive Swat district this year.

And it has debunked government assertions that the militants had been crippled by the Aug. 5 U.S. drone strike that killed longtime Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud.

The attacks are taking place on the cusp of a planned military offensive against the Taliban in its strongholds in Waziristan along the border with Afghanistan.

But it was Punjabi extremists, not the Taliban, who were believed to be behind Thursday’s attacks in Lahore, the country’s cultural capital, on its eastern border with India. Their targets were all symbols of the state security apparatus: the Federal Investigation Agency building, a police academy, and a center on the city’s outskirts that provides counter-terrorism training to elite police forces.

The Lahore attacks were the latest example of the Pakistani Taliban joining forces with militants from Punjab, the most populous province. They raise the specter of more attacks in the country’s heartland at a time when the military is occupied with defeating the Taliban along the Afghan border.

Speaking outside the Federal Investigation Agency building that was attacked, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the recent wave of violence suggests increased collaboration among the Pakistani Taliban, the Al Qaeda terrorist network and two Punjabi militant groups: Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Muhammad, which primarily focus on Indian targets.

“Though the situation is critical,” Malik told reporters, “God willing, we will get rid of these cruel militants and cleanse the country of them.”

In Washington, where top officials continue a broad review of regional strategy, Pentagon and State Department officials portrayed the wave of assaults as an attempt to counter an increasingly effective Pakistani government offensive.

“These attacks are the result of the pressure they are putting on the militants,” said a U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “This is blowback.”

Still, the Lahore attacks elevated concern in the Pentagon, which earlier in the week was downplaying the spate of violence.

“It is evidence they have a real problem on their hands,” said a senior Pentagon official. “But they realize they have a problem and are committed to dealing with it.”

Analysts in Pakistan say the attacks indicate that the threat from the Taliban, which some observers believed had diminished after Mahsud’s death and the Pakistani army’s success in Swat, remains potent.

“After Mahsud’s death, the government and the military thought that the Taliban would now go down, that they would become leaderless and wouldn’t have the will to fight or carry on,” said Javed Hussain, a retired brigadier general with the country’s special forces unit.

“This was all wrong. Now what they are trying to do is to humiliate the government time and time again.

“They want people to lose confidence in the government and military’s ability to provide protection,” he said.

“And they want to warn the government that should the offensive in Waziristan take place, the Taliban will extend the battlefield to all parts of the country.”

For months, the military has been preparing for that offensive by pounding Taliban hide-outs in Waziristan with airstrikes and by cutting off the militant group’s supply and escape routes. The government has been saying almost daily that it is on the verge of launching the ground offensive.

Pakistani leaders have warned that the number of suicide bombings may increase dramatically once the offensive begins.

Militants have unleashed a wave of strikes with a regularity that has unnerved the nation. In the last 11 days, suicide bombing attacks have struck the United Nations’ World Food Program headquarters in Islamabad, the capital, and crowded markets in the northwestern cities of Peshawar and Alpuri. At least 99 people were killed in those assaults.

Last weekend, a team of 10 militants raided the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, taking 42 security officers and civilian workers captive before commandos rescued the hostages. At least 19 people died in that attack.

Thursday’s attacks began around 9:15 a.m. in Lahore, a city of 10 million. They paralyzed the city; as police helicopters hovered overhead, government offices shut down and merchants shuttered their storefronts.

Like last week’s siege at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, the raids in Lahore underscored the militants’ ability to break through the perimeter defenses of a security installation with relative ease. They also reflected the militants’ increasing reliance on commando-style tactics and the use of a variety of weaponry, including automatic rifles, grenades and explosives jackets.

In the attack on the Federal Investigation Agency, a domestic intelligence branch of the Interior Ministry, at least six people were killed and three injured, said Lahore Police Commissioner Pervez Khusro. A lone gunman dressed in a black shalwar kameez, a traditional tunic and baggy pants, entered the building and tossed a grenade into a room where agency officials were seated, then turned around and sprayed gunfire at a group of people nearby, said Mohammed Tahir, one of only four security guards assigned to the building Thursday.

“I saw at least three people fall down after getting hit,” Tahir said, adding that he killed the gunman after a 20-minute exchange of gunfire.

“When my bullet hit him, I saw a hand grenade explode in his hand.”

The strike at the police academy in Manawan was the second attack by militants there this year. In March, militants raided the academy, leaving 12 people dead.

On Thursday, three militants armed with explosives jackets and automatic rifles attacked the building, killing at least six security officers and recruits and wounding seven, said Javed Rathore, a senior Lahore police official. Two suicide bombers detonated their explosives at the building, and the third was shot by police before he could set his off, Rathore said.

The third attack occurred at the elite police training center in Bedian, just outside Lahore, where five militants emerged from fields surrounding the facility and scaled a perimeter wall to get inside, witnesses and police said.

One militant was killed in the compound, but the others were able to enter a wing of the center and kill a police official and a laborer, said Mohammed Ahmad Raza, a police officer involved in the gun battle.

Later, the remaining militants went to the building’s roof, where they exchanged gunfire with Pakistani commandos before killing themselves by detonating their explosives vests, said Lt. Gen. Shafqat Ahmad, Lahore’s top military officer.

In the northwestern city of Kohat, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden pickup truck into a police station, killing 11 people and wounding 12, police said.

Also Thursday, a remote-controlled car bomb in Peshawar killed a 6-year-old boy and wounded nine people, police said.

The attack occurred outside a housing complex for government workers.

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alex.rodriguez@latimes.com

Times staff writers Julian E. Barnes, Paul Richter and Christi Parsons in Washington and special correspondents Shanawaz Khan in Lahore and Zulfiqar Ali in Peshawar contributed to this report.