Bomb outside U.S. consulate in Karachi kills eight people

Bomb outside U.S. consulate in Karachi kills eight people

Aamir Ashraf, Reuters, Karachi, Pakistan

A car bomb outside the U.S. consulate in the port city of Karachi
killed at least eight Pakistanis on Friday, less than a day after
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld left the country, police
said.

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Mark Wentworth,
said no foreigners or staff at the consulate were killed in the
explosion, although one American and five Pakistani employees
sustained minor injuries when struck by flying debris.

Another 20 people outside the consulate were wounded by the
blast, which left a crater several feet deep, destroyed a guard
post and part of a concrete wall surrounding the building.

It also blew in the windows of the consulate and surrounding
buildings, including the upmarket Marriott Hotel next door,
destroyed around 20 cars and scattered body parts 100-200 meters
down the road.

Police said the blast looked like a suicide bombing, similar
to an attack on May 8 outside another nearby hotel in Karachi
that killed 11 French engineers and two Pakistanis.

A police official said Karachi police had received a tip-off a
week ago that another suicide blast was imminent but didn't have
details of when or where.

Friday's blast is the fourth attack this year apparently aimed
at foreigners in Pakistan, after the kidnapping of U.S. reporter
Daniel Pearl in January and a grenade attack on a church in
Islamabad in March which killed five people, including three
foreigners.

Police immediately cordoned off the scene and later closed all
roads leading to the consulate and the Marriott Hotel, with
hundreds of police and paramilitary rangers standing guard.

"Six bodies are in the hospital while parts of two bodies are
still at the place of incident," a police official told Reuters.

"We believe one of the two, whose parts are still there, is a
suicide bomber."

Provincial police chief Syed Kamal Shah said the dead included
a woman and two policemen guarding the consulate.

Police said they believed the bomb was in a white high-roofed
Suzuki van which was being driven past the consulate at the time
of the attack. The van was blown to pieces and the bonnet and
engine catapulted six or seven meters away into a tree.

Laborer Muhammad Khalid said he was walking down the road when
he heard the explosion.

"I felt intense heat all around me after which I fell
unconscious, only to open my eyes in the hospital," he told
Reuters at the Jinnah Post-Graduate Medical Center, his body and
one hand covered in blood-stained bandages.

Kario, a cyclist who suffered serious injuries, said he
remembered smelling smoke all around him before falling
unconscious. "I felt like a mountain had fallen on me," he said.

Although no one admitted responsibility for the attack,
suspicion immediately fell on Islamic radicals opposed to
Pakistan's support for the U.S. war on terror and angered by a
crackdown on militants ordered by President Pervez Musharraf.

"Of course it's a backlash," Hamid Haroon, publisher of
Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, told India's Star News Television.

Musharraf abandoned his former Taliban allies in Afghanistan
and became a key U.S. ally after Sept. 11, a move that sparked
violent reaction from Islamic radicals at home.

Militant groups were further angered when Musharraf launched a
crackdown on them in January. That followed a bloody attack on
the Indian parliament, blamed by New Delhi on Pakistan-based
militants, which took the two countries to the brink of war.

Several attacks, either in India or Pakistan, have been
apparently timed to coincide with high-profile visits to the
region by officials from Washington. Rumsfeld was visiting
Pakistan on a regional tour aimed at averting war with India, and
Pakistan police said they feared an attack was imminent.

"Police were apprehending a week back that a French-type
suicide attack will occur at any time," a police source told
Reuters. "They had a tip but no lead. They informed the central
government as well."

India, backed by the United States, has demanded Musharraf
stop Muslim militants crossing into Indian-held Kashmir to fight
Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan region. It condemned
Friday's bomb attack.

"It is a very sad and a very regrettable incident that we
condemn fully," Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh told reporters. "I
am really grieved and unhappy that yet another terrorist activity
of a suicide bomb variety has taken place in Karachi."

The Dawn's Haroon said the attack showed Pakistan was as much
a victim of terrorism as anyone else, and said India and the
United States should understand the problems Musharraf faced in
his efforts to reign in Islamic radicals.

"Possibly now policymakers in Delhi and Mr Rumsfeld
himself...will see that reining in the terrorists is not quite so
easy," he said. "It requires systematic work and doesn't require
a kind of harsh now-or-never line that we have been seeing in the
last three months."