Pakistani president escapes assassination bid

Security forces are investigating an assassination attempt on Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf – at least the second since he enraged hardliners by backing the war on terror in Afghanistan.

A bomb exploded moments after Musharraf’s motorcade passed a bridge yesterday. No-one was hurt.

Military trucks and armed soldiers cordoned off the area in Rawalpindi as bomb experts and other investigators sifted through rubble, witnesses said.

“There was an explosion just half a minute or one minute after we crossed,” Musharraf told the state PTV network.

”I felt the explosion in my car. That’s all I know except of course it was a terrorist act and it certainly was me who was targeted.”

Information minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said the president was returning to his home at Army House in Rawalpindi from the city’s airport after a visit to Karachi.

A witness told GEO TV that he heard the explosion and saw smoke billowing out of the bridge after Musharraf’s motorcade passed by.

“As the president’s car passed it appeared that somebody tried to blow up the bridge,” Irfan Mirza told the network. “After that there were clouds of black smoke there.”

Talat Masood, a former senior defence official, said it was too early to say who was behind the attack, but the mostly likely suspects were hardliners opposed to Musharraf’s policy on Afghanistan, and his efforts to reform Islamic schools that have become hotbeds of radicalism.

Musharraf, the army chief, came to power in 1999 in a bloodless coup, toppling an elected government.

He drew the wrath of hardline Islamic groups after he abandoned the Taliban regime of neighbouring Afghanistan and backed the war against Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network following the September 11 attacks.

There has been at least one previous attempt on his life.

Three Islamic militants were sentenced to 10 years for planting a bomb in car along a route Musharraf passed on a congested road in Karachi on April 26, 2002.

The remote-controlled device failed to detonate.

“Let me say with confidence I’m used to such incidents, it’s happened before,” Musharraf told PTV.

“I have been saying that the greatest danger to our nation is not external, it is internal and comes from religious and sectarian extremists, and this is a typical example of that.”