Reuters

* 6 players, coach from Sri Lanka team wounded
* Eight people killed, including 6 police and bus driver
* Search on after gunmen melt away
* Pakistani minister accuses India
* Official says attack bore hallmarks of Mumbai last year

A dozen gunmen attacked Sri Lanka's cricket team on Tuesday with rifles, grenades and rockets, wounding six players and a British coach and killing at least eight Pakistanis in Lahore, officials said.

The attackers fired AK-47s and rockets and hurled grenades at Sri Lanka's team bus as it was being driven to Lahore's Gaddafi stadium for the third day of a match against Pakistan.

Team captain Mahela Jayawardene said the gunmen first shot at the tyres then at the bus itself.

"We all dived to the floor to take cover," he told Reuters by telephone from the stadium, before being evacuated by helicopter along with the rest of the team, including all the wounded.

At least eight people were killed in the attack, which lasted close to 30 minutes, including six police, according to statement from Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's office.<!--break-->

A little tabloid-style fearmongering, but as cricket, not soccer is Pakistan's national sport, this is not just a story about cricket.

Sky News - Pakistan is slowly and violently falling apart.

The main stream politicians and counter-terrorism experts know they have pretty much lost the North West frontier and Swat Province.

They know the cities of Karachi and Quetta are unstable and that the Islamists are within 100 miles of the gates of Islamabad. The well-planned and well-equipped Lahore attack tells us nowhere in Pakistan is safe and that the people's love of cricket will not spare the national sport from being targeted.

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they banned all "infidel" sport. Their brothers in Pakistan take a similar view, especially when the cricketers are accompanied by western officials.

The attack was well planned

There have been a few minor terrorist incidents in Lahore in the past few years but nothing on this scale, and nothing designed to make global headlines.

This was probably not to do with the Sri Lankan cricket team; it was not personal, it was business - albeit murderous business - and falls into the pattern of attacks designed to show the people the central government cannot lead or protect them.
more at the link

_{I feel the American worker has been sacrificed to the capitalist idols in the ancient Mayan fashion. - Sue Lamb, NYT reader}

They were bored with the slow pace of the game, and wanted to add excitement.

And, before any comments on cricket, yes I've played it. A test match takes up to 3 days, up to 4 innings, over 33 outs and retirements, hopefully many fours & sixes, and many, many overs.

And rain stops play.

Oy, don't think so , but who knows?

Reuters
ISLAMABAD, March 3 -

A Pakistani minister accused India of being behind the attack on Sri Lanka's cricket team in the city of Lahore on Tuesday, saying the attackers had crossed into Pakistan from India.

"The evidence which we have got shows that these terrorists entered from across the border from India," Sardar Nabil Ahmed Gabol, minister of state for shipping, told private Geo television. "This was a conspiracy to defame Pakistan internationally."

"This incident took place in reaction to 26/11," he said referring to the Mumbai attacks in November in which at least 170 people were killed. "It is a declaration of open war on Pakistan by India," said the minister, who is not one of the government's official spokesmen, but belongs to President Asif Ali Zardari's party.

_{I feel the American worker has been sacrificed to the capitalist idols in the ancient Mayan fashion. - Sue Lamb, NYT reader}

and India puts its two cents in....

WASHINGON

Times of India - ...
Obama's ...reaction to the attack came in response to a question during a joint media appearance with Brown at the White House. "Details are still coming in... we are deeply concerned... both Great Britain and the United States share a deep interest in ensuring that neither Afghanistan or Pak are safe havens for terrorist activity," he said.

However, as with many US officials and lawmakers, including those from the previous administration, Obama also seemed to labour under the impression that the safe havens are confined largely to Pakistan's frontier regions, even events suggested terrorism has urban underpinnings with strikes in Islamabad, Karachi, Quetta, and in this instance, Lahore.

The headquarters of the ISI-sponsored Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, which changed its name to Jamaad-ul-Dawa is in the town of Muridke, close to Lahore. The intelligence community in India and US believe LeT-JuD wards, trained by active or renegade ISI and Pakistan military officials, carried out the Mumbai attack.

The Lahore attack is reported to have involved 12 terrorists. The blogosphere was thick with speculation that the second group was trained to attack the Indian cricket team (which cancelled its tour of Pakistan after the Mumbai carnage), but "settled" for the largely Buddhist (and therefore "kaffir") Sri Lankan team.

Some Pakistani TV hosts, under the benign eye of the Islamic Republic;s new civilian dispensation, vigorously promote such garbage as "kaffir" and "dar al-harb" to foster religious hatred...

more at the link

_{I feel the American worker has been sacrificed to the capitalist idols in the ancient Mayan fashion. - Sue Lamb, NYT reader}

I suspect that if "they" wanted to kill the team, they wouldn't have killed the police, they would have killed the team - nymole

Ali Sethi | Lahore,Pakistan | March 3

NYT Op -Ed - ...

I asked [Constable] Ali Raza if he thought there was a chance that the attack was the work of terrorists or criminals. “There is a chance,” he admitted. “But it could be the agencies. It could be the government. It could be India also.”

I asked, “What about other people?”

“Which other people?”

I said, “The people who kidnap journalists and bomb the homes of politicians and slit the throats of government spies.”

He was thinking about it.

The man operating the paan stall ...smiled at us and said, “Whoever has done this has a lot of intelligence.”

more at the link

_{I feel the American worker has been sacrificed to the capitalist idols in the ancient Mayan fashion. - Sue Lamb, NYT reader}

English referee Broad condemns Pakistan security over terrorist attack

Security forces deserted cricket convoy having promised 'presidential-style' security, says official caught up in attack on Sri Lankan cricketers

* David Hopps
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 March 2009 14.34 GMT
* Article history

'We were sitting ducks' says Chris Broad Link to this video

Chris Broad, the former England batsman turned match referee who escaped unhurt from the commando-style ambush on the Sri Lankan cricket squad, voiced his anger today at the failures of the Pakistan security forces.

Broad, who arrived back at Manchester Airport today, castigated Pakistan for not providing the "presidential-style security" that had been promised. He accused the security services of fleeing from the attack and leaving the match-officials van as "sitting ducks"

He also refuted reports that he had been a hero and had helped to save the life of the Pakistani umpire Ahsan Raza, who remains in a critical condition in a Lahore hospital. "I wasn't a hero, I was lying on the van floor," he said.

Although still unaware of reports that Pakistan had been forewarned of a potential terrorist attack, Broad's anger was palpable.

"After the incident there was not a sign of a policemen anywhere," he said. "They had clearly gone, left the scene and left us to be sitting ducks. I am extremely angry that we were promised high-level security and in our hour of need that security vanished and we were left open to anything that the terrorists wanted.

"I am extremely fortunate to be here today. Questions need to be asked of Pakistan security. They promised security and it wasn't there when we needed it.

"When we were in the van we weren't aware of what was going on outside. Once the shooting had died down we put our heads above the windows and somebody said: 'There's no one here.'

"The driver was still dead in the driving position. At one stage the door opened and an elite policeman threw himself in the van and lay on top of me. That wasn't particularly brave of him. I started shouting at him to get in the seat and drive us away. He said in his broken English, 'I can't drive'. Eventually another policemen from somewhere opened the front door, unceremoniously dumped the driver on the floor and drove us to the ground.

"It is not just the official security. At every junction there are police with handguns controlling traffic, so how did the terrorists come to the roundabout and these guys do nothing about it?"

Broad, one of the ICC's most experienced match referees, revealed that he had been unnerved about Sri Lanka's tour after the ICC had withdrawn the Champions Trophy from Pakistan, and had asked for reassurances about his safety.

"I had an inkling before this Test match leg of the tour that something might happen, although I certainly didn't think that this was going to happen," he said. "I raised my concerns with the ICC before the tour started. They passed on my concerns to the PCB, to Zakir Khan, the operations manager of the PCB, and he assured me that all security would be taken care of, presidential-style security, and clearly that didn't happen.

"I, like many people, naively thought that there was no way that the terrorists would attack cricket. That has changed and cricket has to do something about it."

Broad not only rejected attempts to depict him as a hero, he suggested that it was Raza, the critically injured fourth umpire, who might have saved his life.

"I wasn't a hero. I was lying on the van floor. There were bullets hitting the van. It could be as much as 20 to 25 bullets. It wasn't real. I saw the Sri Lankan bus stop and we heard these popping sounds. We didn't know what they were. It was Ahsan Raza who told us to get down.

"Having talked to Simon Taufel and Steve Davis, I think we all have the same feeling we were just waiting for a bullet to hit us. Ahsan Raza took a bullet in the stomach, chest, I think somewhere in the spleen and the lung region. I was actually lying behind him in the van, bullets were flying all around us. I only noticed he was injured when this huge pool of blood spilled out of his back, spilled out onto the van floor and out of the partially opened door.

"I couldn't think what to do. I tried to comfort him. I placed my hand on his back but he was clearly critically injured. He is just an umpire, he just wanted to umpire, he loved the game."

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Conspiracy theories fuelled by security lapses as hunt for gunmen continues

By Omar Waraich in Lahore

Thursday, 5 March 2009

Dramatic footage showing the alleged perpetrators of Tuesday's audacious attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team making their getaway was released by a Pakistani news channel last night.

The grainy images, captured by four CCTV cameras minutes after the ambush, show the gunmen strolling calmly through the back streets of Liberty Market just before 9am. In one sequence, three of the men walk down a narrow, deserted street, carrying heavy bags and with weapons slung over their shoulders. They then mount a waiting motorcycle and speed away.

Yesterday, police released "wanted" posters bearing sketches of the suspects. Up to 14 masked gunmen took part in the attack on the Sri Lankan team's tour bus at the Liberty Square roundabout in the heart of Lahore. They opened fire on the bus, killing a driver and six police officers escorting the Sri Lankans. Six players and two assistant coaches were wounded.
Related articles

* Chris Broad: 'There were no security forces to be seen. They had clearly left us there to be sitting ducks...'
* Andrew Buncombe: Well-trained, motivated and on the rise. But who are these militants?
* Patrick Cockburn: My day with the terror 'charity' working 15 miles from Lahore
* Everyone is at risk now, says Morris

President Asif Ali Zardari has vowed the attackers will be caught and punished "with iron hands", but as detectives searched for clues to the whereabouts of the fugitives, the Lahore police commissioner Khusro Pervez confessed there had been "major security lapses". There was also confusion yesterday as officials made contradictory claims about the arrests so far. Mr Pervez said "some suspects" had been detained but that was denied by another senior officer.

Meanwhile, the Punjab government offered a 10 million rupee (£88,000) reward for information leading to the gunmen. The Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said officials were pursuing "important leads" and the government had "constituted a special team of investigators".

Opposition MPs and many in the Pakistani media have seized on the government's floundering and accused it of glaring intelligence failures. The Sri Lankan team agreed to tour Pakistan after being assured they would receive security equal to that given to the President. Instead, the authorities failed to take crucial measures to protect the squad. Their bus was accompanied by only two police vans, when it should have been boxed in on all four sides. Only the windscreen was bullet-proofed, and the driver was using the same vehicle and following the same route from the team's hotel to the cricket ground for the third day in a row. No attempt was made to block traffic or line the route with police.

"There was no outer cordon," Mr Pervez admitted. "When they were escorted, the [police] vehicles used were not the appropriate vehicles."

The numerous failings fuelled speculation that the attack might have been, at least in part, an "inside job". In previous terror attacks in Pakistan, the perpetrators appeared to have considerable intelligence about their targets. Car bombers have struck at army and anti-terror police headquarters in the past two years without the slightest hindrance.

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Rediff

Police in Pakistan have arrested one of seven men suspected of being behind the attack on Sri Lanka's cricket team in Lahore in March, officials say.

"We have broken up a Punjabi Taliban network and we have arrested an attacker who shot dead a policeman," Lahore police chief Pervez Rathor said.

Seven Pakistanis - six police guards and the driver of a Sri Lankan team bus - were killed in the attack.

Gunmen ambushed the bus as it drove to a cricket stadium for a match.

Black mask

Mr Rathor said that the suspect was a member of the banned militant Tehreek-e-Taliban Punjab organisation.

He identified the suspect as Zubair, also known by his alias Nek Mohammad, who appeared at the televised press conference in Pakistan's cultural hub Lahore with his face completely covered in a black mask.

"We came to Lahore two days before the attack," Zubair shouted through his mask, adding that they had stayed in a small house on the outskirts of Lahore.

Mr Rathor said that the mastermind of the attack was a man named Farooq.

He and the other attackers are all believed to have fled to the tribal region of Waziristan on the border with Afghanistan.

"The plan was actually to kidnap the Sri Lankan team," Mr Rathor said.

The BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan in Islamabad says that this is the first time that the 'Punjabi Taliban' has been named in a major militant attack in Pakistan.

Our correspondent says that until now, the term was used to describe members of banned jihadi groups who have taken refuge in Pakistan's tribal areas.

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