MULTAN, Pakistan: Militants armed with rocket-propelled and hand grenades and a car bomb attacked an office of Pakistan's main security agency in the city of Multan yesterday killing 12 people, officials said.

The bomb attack in the eastern city was the third in Pakistan in two days and underscored the relentless security troubles facing the US ally whose help is vital in efforts to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan.

The violence coincides with rising political tension with the Supreme Court hearing challenges to an amnesty order that could heap pressure on President Asif Ali Zardari.

Al-Qaida-linked militants have demonstrated time and again they can penetrate security on the approaches to sensitive buildings.

Top Multan city official Mohammad Ali Gardezi said body parts of two of the nine dead, believed to have been suicide attackers, were strewn over a road outside the office of the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

"Our security agencies were on alert and they didn't let the attackers reach their target," Gardezi told reporters, adding 47 people had been wounded.

Between two and four attackers fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a checkpost outside the ISI office, then threw hand grenades and set off their car bomb, police said.

The fronts of several homes by the checkpost were destroyed.

Pakistan's military, once a staunch supporter of Afghan militants in their fight against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, now faces brazen Taliban insurgents on its own soil.

Northwestern Peshawar has suffered the most from retaliatory bombings that have killed hundreds of people since October, when the army launched an offensive in South Waziristan on the Afghan border, part of a region seen as a global militant hub.

But two bombs went off in a market in the eastern city of Lahore on Monday evening, killing 49 people and wounding more than 100.

The attack in Multan will compound fears that the militants are pushing their campaign out of the northwest.

Many of the militant attacks have been on the security forces, including the army headquarters in the city of Rawalpindi.

A suicide car-bomber killed 10 people in an attack on an ISI office in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Nov. 13.

Pakistan's priority is defeating the Taliban at home, but the task has been complicated by U.S. pressure to root out fighters who cross the border to Afghanistan to attack U.S. troops.

President Barack Obama sent a clear message to Pakistan last week in his speech outlining plans to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, must not allow its territory to be used as a sanctuary for militants.

In Islamabad, the Supreme Court continued a hearing into challenges to an amnesty decree which, if struck down, could spark a political crisis for embattled President Zardari.

The amnesty was introduced by former president Pervez Musharraf under a plan to bring Bhutto back from self-imposed exile under a power-sharing pact. Bhutto returned in October 2007, but she was assassinated just weeks later.

Zardari, the widower of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, cannot be prosecuted whatever the outcome of the case because of presidential immunity.

But criminal cases could be reopened against government officials, including the interior and defence ministers, if the court strikes down the decree.

Reuters

(China Daily 12/09/2009 page11)