Pakistan police targeted as attacks kill 31

LAHORE, Pakistan, (Reuters) – Militants launched a  string of attacks in the Pakistani heartland and in the  troubled northwest yesterday, killing 31 people after a week  of violence in which more than 100 people died.

The attacks on police in Lahore, capital of Punjab  province, and a car bomb in Kohat in the northwest, come ahead  of an expected military offensive against the Taliban in their  South Waziristan stronghold on the Afghan border.

Later, a car bomb was set off by remote control in a  neighbourhood where government workers live in the northwestern  city of Peshawar killing a child and wounding about a dozen  people, police said.

The violence, just days after a daring raid on the army  headquarters in Rawalpindi, underscored the risk posed by  militants to Punjab, Pakistan’s most economically important  province and the country’s traditional seat of power.

“First the (North West) Frontier province was on the front  line, now they are playing their games in Punjab,” Interior  Minister Rehman Malik told Geo television.

The government says most attacks are plotted in South  Waziristan and carried out by Taliban, often with the help of  allies from militant groups based in Punjab province.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan is under U.S. pressure to crack down  on Islamist militancy as President Barack Obama considers a  boost in troop numbers fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Ten gunmen, some of them teenagers, were killed in the  attacks on three police centres in Lahore.

Seven people, including a gunman, were killed at a regional  headquarters of the police’s Federal Investigation Agency. One  gunman escaped and one was captured, security officials said.

A suicide car-bomber attacked the same building in March  last year killing 21 people.

Gunmen also attacked two police training centres, one a  training school attacked this year and the other an elite  police academy set in fields in the city outskirts.

Eleven police, six of them recruits, and four gunmen were  killed at the Manawa training centre, police said. Three of the  black-clad attackers blew themselves up.

A policeman, a civilian and five gunmen were killed at the  academy. Three gunmen blew themselves up and two, including one  who was about 16, were shot by snipers, police said.