Pakistani PM escapes Taleban gun attack on his car

TALEBAN gunmen hit the car of the Pakistani prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, yesterday – but he was not in it at the time.

The attack happened as an official motorcade was heading to Islamabad airport to pick up Mr Gilani. Shots were fired from a small hill and two bullets hit the driver's window.

The Taleban claimed responsibility for the attack, three days ahead of Pakistan's presidential election, which is bound to compound the fears of allies worried about chronic political instability and Islamist violence in the nuclear-armed country.

The prime minister's office said multiple sniper shots had been fired and television pictures showed two bullet marks a couple of inches apart on the cracked bullet-proof window.

Mr Gilani is a member of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's party. She was killed in a suicide gun and bomb attack last December while campaigning for a general election. The government blamed militants linked to al-Qaeda.

Ms Bhutto's party went on to win the February election and Mr Gilani became prime minister of a coalition government.

A Pakistani Taleban spokesman said he had been attacked because he was responsible for offensives against militants in the north-west of the country. "We will continue such attacks on government officials and installations," Muslim Khan said.

Pakistani Taleban and its al-Qaeda allies have unleashed a wave of bomb attacks, including some on political leaders such as Ms Bhutto, over the past year. Hundreds of people have been killed.

The former president Pervez Musharraf, who resigned last month, narrowly survived two bomb attacks that were blamed on al-Qaeda.

Ms Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who now leads her party and is expected to win the presidential election on Saturday, last week moved from his Islamabad home into the heavily guarded prime minister's house because of security fears.

While the government has come in for criticism for not focusing on economic problems, it is also under pressure from the United States and other western countries which have troops in Afghanistan to tackle the Taleban in border sanctuaries.

The US claims that militants from al-Qaeda and Taleban are based in Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun tribal areas on the Afghan border, where they orchestrate attacks in both Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as plot violence in the West.

Early yesterday, what were thought to be US soldiers from Afghanistan, backed by helicopter gunships, attacked inside Pakistan, killing 20 people, including women and children, Pakistani officials said.

The attack, in a border village in the South Waziristan region, sparked an uproar. Mr Gilani condemned the attack, saying Pakistan was fully capable of tackling militants on its own, while the foreign ministry said it was to lodge a diplomatic protest.

"Such actions are counter- productive and certainly do not help our joint efforts to fight terrorism," the ministry said. "On the contrary, they undermine the very basis of co-operation and may fuel the fire of hatred and violence."

A spokeswoman for Afghanistan's Nato-led force said she had no information about the incident, while Bryan Whitman, a US defence department spokesman, said: "I have nothing for you on those reports."

Meanwhile, Pakistani forces were reported to have killed 30 militants during a clash in Swat, a valley north-west of Islamabad where there has been fighting since late 2007.

'We missed chance to catch Zawahri'

PAKISTANI security forces have missed a chance to catch Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaeda's second-in-command, the government has revealed.

He and Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, have been in hiding since the attacks on the United States on 11 September, 2001. They are both believed to be in ethnic Pashtun tribal lands that straddle north-west Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

Rehman Malik, an interior ministry official, told a news conference that Zawahri was moving between Pakistan's tribal areas and the eastern Afghan provinces of Kunar and Paktia.

"We certainly had traced him at one place, but we missed the chance. So he's moving in Mohmand (a Pakistani tribal region] and, of course, sometimes in Kunar, mostly in Kunar and Paktia," he said.

He did not say when they had missed the chance to catch him or give any further details of the incident.

Mr Malik said Pakistani Taleban was working hand in glove with al-Qaeda, providing them with shelter and acting as their mouthpiece. "They have not only connections, I would say Tehrik-e-Taleban is an extension of al-Qaeda," he said, referring to a Taleban umbrella group which authorities blame for a string of bomb attacks over the past year that have killed hundreds of people.