PAKISTAN: A fifth member of a group of 26 injured in a grenade attack on a Christian hospital chapel in Pakistan died yesterday, as it emerged that a new Islamic group had been formed in the country to attack Westerners and Christians.
Mr Shabaz Bhatti, head of the All Pakistani Minority Alliance, told reporters that a 28-year-old Christian nurse and mother of three, Ms Parveen Nelson, died from shrapnel wounds.
Three nurses, all Pakistani women, were killed on Friday when three men lobbed grenades at a congregation leaving a church service at the Christian Hospital in Taxila, an ancient Buddhist town 25 kilometres west of Islamabad. One of the attackers was also found dead at the scene, police and hospital workers said.
Friday's attack was the second strike on a Christian target within a week. Last Monday, masked gunmen raided a Christian school for foreign aid workers' children in the Murree hills, about 40 kilometres north-east of Islamabad, killing six Pakistanis.
Details emerged yesterday about Monday's attack that suggest the death toll could have been much higher if not for the quick thinking of staff. A report by the Associated Pakistan Press said the gunmen had tried to pass themselves off as cricket coaches before pulling an assault rifle from a bag and opening fire on reception staff.
"As the attackers rushed towards the school, they were seen by a police constable . . . who opened fire, [while] some sensible staff bolted the door from inside," the report said.
Military spokesman Maj Gen Rashid Qureshi told AFP yesterday there was evidence that the Taxila attack and the Murree raid were connected, and this signalled that a new strategy had been adopted by Islamic militants angry at President Pervez Musharraf's support for US-led military action in neighbouring Afghanistan.
"These were 'soft' targets whereas before the focus . . . was on high-profile targets such as the US consulate and the French naval engineers in Karachi," he said, referring to car-bombings in the southern Pakistani city earlier this year, which claimed 23 lives.
Local media reported yesterday that the attacks were evidence of a new strategy by groups sympathetic to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
A report yesterday in the Nation said President Musharraf's aides had told him that factions from two outlawed Islamic groups had joined forces to launch attacks on Westerners and Christians.
The report said top officials of the banned Harkat ul-Mujahideen and Jaish-i-Muhammad Islamic groups told intelligence officials that some of their "trained elements" had broken ranks to form "anti-Christian, anti-West" strike groups.