THIS audacious attack by militants has shocked Pakistan.
MILITANTS have destroyed the headquarters of Karachi’s main anti-terrorist agency in a massive suicide blast that killed 18 people and signalled an ominous expansion of the Taliban insurgency spreading through the nuclear-armed nation.
More than 130 people were wounded in the attack by at least six terrorists who hit the heavily secured Criminal Investigation Department compound at about 8.20pm on Thursday (2.20am yesterday, AEDT), lobbing grenades and exchanging gunfire with guards before ramming a truck piled with up to 1000kg of explosives into a boundary wall.
Several officials yesterday compared the strike – one of the largest on the southern city – with the September 2008 bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel, which killed about 60 people.
The latest bombing destroyed several buildings, leaving people trapped beneath the rubble and a crater more than 12m wide in front of the site. The force of the bomb shattered windows within a 3km radius and severed power supplies in the city.
“It was a huge blast which created a big crater, a bit like the Islamabad Marriott hotel,” said Zulfiqar Mirza, the Interior Minister of the southern province of Sindh.
The CID compound lies within Karachi’s most secure quarter, known as the “red zone”, along with several five-star hotels, the chief minister’s residence and the US consulate.
Police were yesterday combing through the rubble and studying CCTV footage from nearby traffic lights for clues to how the attackers managed to breach one of the most secure areas of the city.
A senior police official told Dawn newspaper: “Five or six attackers took out the guards present at the main entrance of the CID offices. One of them went inside the raised barrier and opened the gate. Meanwhile, policemen who were in the building opened retaliatory fire and the attackers rammed an explosives-laden truck of medium size into the second gate of the building.”
Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Taliban yesterday claimed responsibility for the attack.
Spokesman Azam Tariq said: “They used to arrest and torture our comrades here. We will target everyone who does this in the same way.”
Other reports suggested the attackers were from the al-Qa’ida and Taliban-affiliated Lashkar-e-Janghvi, and were attempting to storm the compound to free seven militants arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of plotting to strike at Shia Muslim processions in the city.
But Inspector-General of Police Sultan Salahuddin Babar Khattak denied any high-profile suspects were being kept in the compound – which houses an anti-terrorism police unit as well as women’s and men’s police buildings – at the time. Karachi had until this year been relatively insulated from the insurgency raging across Pakistan’s northwest.
But Taliban violence has been escalating in the sprawling city of 18 million – Pakistan’s financial hub and a key point on NATO’s military supply route into Afghanistan – with the government crackdown on militants in Khyber Paktunkhwa, and escalated drone strikes, forcing many to seek refuge in the south.
Most previous terror strikes on Karachi have been on soft targets such as shrines and religious processions.
But the latest – against the city’s main security facility – suggests insurgents are growing bolder.
Former Pakistan military brigadier turned security analyst Mahmoud Shah told The Weekend Australian the audacity of the strike was likely to have taken authorities by surprise.
“When you consider that the Taliban is thought to have become weaker (as a result of the crackdown), and that we have seen law and order improve in Peshawar and surrounding areas, this strike has taken us aback,” he said.
“From the point of view of the Taliban’s capability it suggests that, rather than weakening, they may be shifting their focus to the south.” The Karachi bombing comes less than a week after a suicide blast at a mosque packed with worshippers killed 68 people in northwest Pakistan.
That attack, in the Darra Adem Khel region, was followed hours later by a grenade assault on a second mosque in the same area that killed four people.
Karachi suffered its most serious bout of political violence in years in August, when 85 people were killed after a politician was shot dead.
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