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Pakistan's PM-designate survives assassination bid Pakistan's prime minister-designate Shaukat Aziz escaped unhurt in a suicide bomb attack Friday that killed at least six people, including his driver, witnesses and officials said.
Another 45 people were wounded, seven of them seriously, in the attack near Fatehjung, a rural constituency close to the town of Attock in the central province of Punjab, where Aziz was campaigning for a by-election.
"These cowardly acts will not deter us from our fight against terror. Such dastardly acts are against the tenets and teachings of Islam," Musharraf said in a statement issued to national news agency Associated Press of Pakistan following the attack on the man he wants as his next prime minister.
Aziz, 55 and currently finance minister, was sat in the rear of his bulletproof Mercedes car after a campaign meeting when a suicide bomber set off an explosion alongside the vehicle.
"It is sad that some lost their lives and some were wounded. I condole with their families and my resolve for the service of Pakistan and the Islamic world has further strengthened," Aziz told state-run Pakistan Television, or PTV, after the attack.
Tahir Sadiq, the mayor of Attock who was traveling in the same car with Aziz, told Reuters their driver was one of the victims.
Aziz gave a first hand account of the attempt on his life to senior colleagues in the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, on his return to Islamabad, around three hours away by road.
ATTACK AFTER MEETING
The attack took place immediately after a political meeting on open ground close to a railway track near a village called Jaffar Moar, in the Fatehjung constituency.
"He (Aziz) was sat in the rear of his car, behind the driver and they were just about to move off when a bearded man of about 30 approached and when he came in contact with the driver's door he blew himself up," Mushahid Hussain, secretary general of the PML, told Reuters.
Hours after the attack, a Reuters correspondent could see a head and a hand, that police say belonged to the bomber, still lying at the scene of the blast along with the body of the dead driver in Aziz's damaged black Mercedes and another white Toyota with bloodstains on its windows.
Pakistan's next prime minister was described by the PML secretary-general as "calm, cool and composed" after his narrow escape.
General Musharraf persuaded Aziz to give up a 30-year career with Citibank in New York to become finance minister after he took power in a bloodless military coup in 1999.
Clearly favored by Musharraf following his success in turning around a beleaguered economy, Aziz was named as the prime minister in waiting after Zafarullah Khan Jamali resigned in late June.
A caretaker prime minister, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain will step down once Aziz wins a required seat in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, in one of the two by-elections he is set to contest on Aug. 18.
The articulate, silver-haired ex-banker represents the kind of moderate, progressive Muslim that Musharraf wants to promote in a country racked by Islamic militancy, poverty and illiteracy.
But many ordinary Pakistanis complain that Musharraf, a key ally in the U.S.-led war on terror, is too subservient to U.S.-wishes and regard the ex-Citibank executive with suspicion, with some even call him an agent of the United States. |
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