Suicide bombers attacked a mosque and a religious school within
minutes Friday in two Pakistani cities, leaving one of the
country's most prominent anti-Taliban clerics dead in what
authorities called a targeted killing.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for either blast, but
relatives of Sarfraz Naeemi said he had received death threats
recently after condemning suicide attacks as un-Islamic and the
Taliban as murderers.
Pakistan has been rocked by a wave of bombings and other attacks
in recent weeks blamed on militants taking revenge for a military
operation against the Taliban in the Swat Valley region. More than
100 people have been killed since May 27, and places of worship
have been targeted three times since last Friday.
The government has vowed to rid the country of militants, and it
has been emboldened by broad support for the Swat campaign from a
public that has started openly denouncing the militants after years
of ambivalence.
After the blast that killed Naeemi, hundreds of outraged
seminary students gathered at the scene and demanded the Taliban
leave Pakistan. "Down with the Taliban!" they shouted.
The campaign has intensified pressure on the militants in
strongholds they have established in the religiously
ultra-conservative northwest on the border with Afghanistan.
Police official Sohail Sukhera said at least one assailant
entered the offices of the Jamia Naeemia seminary in the heart of
Lahore shortly after the end of traditional Friday prayers and
detonated a bomb powerful enough to collapse the building. Five
people died and three were wounded.
Naeemi was the apparent target of the attack and died on his way
to a hospital, said his son, Waqar.
"I was still in the mosque when I heard a big bang. We rushed
toward the office and there was a smell of explosives in the air.
There was blood and several people were crying in pain," Waqar
said.
Television footage showed Naeemi's body lying on a stretcher,
his beard and hair covered in dust and blood stains around his
nostrils.
Naeemi had recently led dozens of moderate clerics in meetings
and lectures in which he denounced suicide attacks _ a common
tactic of Pakistan's Islamist groups _ and supported the military's
operation to oust the Taliban from Swat.
A leading moderate, he advocated equal access to education for
women and the use of computers in schools _ ideas sharply at odds
with the Taliban's harsh interpretation of Islam.
Naeemi's brother Mohammad Tajwar said the cleric had recently
received death threats but had refused the offer of police
protection.
The attack was quickly condemned as un-Islamic.
"A true Muslim even cannot think of such activity," said Mufti
Muneebur Rehman, a senior moderate cleric and Naeemi's friend.
"He was someone who would never speak the language of bullets,
and targeting such a soft person is a brutal act," said Hamid Saeed
Kazmi, Pakistan's minister for religious affairs. "Those who have
done it have not served Islam. They are not Muslims. They are the
enemies of Islam and enemies of Pakistan."
Punjab provincial Law Minister Rana Sanaullah blamed terrorists
from the tribal areas and Swat for Friday's attacks.
In the second attack around the same time Friday, a pickup truck
loaded with explosives was rammed into the wall of a mosque in an
area where soldiers live in Noshehra, a small city in the
northwest, police official Aziz Khan said. At least four people
died and more than 100 were wounded, he said.
Militants were blamed for a suicide attack a week earlier on a
mosque in Upper Dir that killed at least 30 people. That blast
prompted local villagers to form a civilian militia that has chased
and killed several militants since.
Washington strongly backs the Swat operation, which is widely
viewed as a test of Pakistan's resolve to confront militancy after
years of deals and policies criticized as being too soft on the
militants.
Fierce fighting continued in Swat on Friday, the military said,
where troops captured Chuprial town in a major battle that killed
39 militants and 8 soldiers. It was the highest death toll in a
single day's fighting in the offensive, which began in late April
and which the army says it is close to winning.
Elsewhere Friday, gunmen in Peshawar attacked the home of Lt.
Gen. Masood Aslam, the army commander of the Swat offensive,
leaving him uninjured but two militants dead; and military jets
began bombarding suspected militant strongholds in the tribal
region of Bajur. Casualties were not immediately known there.
In another tribal region, Hangu, suspected militants detonated a
roadside bomb that killed the regional police chief and four other
officers, said Farid Khan, a police official.
In Peshawar late Thursday, one officer was killed and a dozen
other people were wounded in a grenade and suicide bomb attack at a
police checkpoint.
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Associated Press writers Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Munir Ahmad and
Asif Shahzad in Islamabad contributed to this report.