Suicide bombers kill seven at Islamabad University
At least seven people died and 29 were injured in a double suicide bombing at the University of Islamabad today, Pakistan's seventh major militant terror attack in a fortnight.
Emergency workers described scenes of bloody chaos after the near simultaneous lunchtime blasts outside a packed women's cafeteria and at the Islamic law faculty used by male students.
No group has yet claimed responsibility, but Taleban and al Qaeda-linked extremists are assumed to be to have carried out the attack in revenge for the current military offensive against militant strongholds in the northwest.
Suspicion has fallen in particular on the large number of students from the restless northwest of the country who travel to the capital to study in madrassas, religious schools.
Madrassa students were behind another bombing at a security post in the capital three months ago, analysts say.
There is panic. Students are rushing to donate blood. There are a lot of police arrived inside the building, said student Qudrat Ullah at the scene of the law faculty blast.
Casualties were taken away first in private vehicles. Then ambulances arrived. I saw several people wounded."
Emergency workers said that the bombed cafe was littered with broken glass and splattered with fragments of flesh. TV footage showed a woman with a bloodied left leg being carried away on a stretcher.
A government official put the death toll at seven, including the bombers.
Rehman Malik, the Pakistan Interior Minister, who visited the city's main PIMS hospital where the casualties were taken, said that one of the dead was a woman, believed to be a female student in her early 20s.
Hospital spokesman Altaf Hussein said that several of the wounded were in a serious condition.
We have also received body parts including one severed leg that we cannot identify, he added.
The Pakistani authorities have been braced for bloodshed since the Army began its offensive against the Islamist rebels' strongholds in South Waziristan on Saturday.
The country has endured a spike in militant violence since the killing of the Pakistani Taleban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a missile attack by a US spy plane. More than 170 people have been killed in the last fortnight.
The most audacious attack was a mass hostage taking ten days ago at the Army headquarters in Rawalpindi, the garrison town next to Islamabad, in which 23 people died.
It was after this that Army leaders decided to press ahead with the long-threatened assault on the rebels' bases in South Waziristan, where most of the attacks are believed to have been planned.
More than 110,000 civilians have fled as refugees from the fighting, and according to Army statistics - which cannot be verified - 98 militants and 13 soldiers have so far been killed. Taleban spokesmen deny that the insurgents have lost a single fighter.
Fierce fighting continues in South Waziristan, as around 10,000 insurgents use guerilla tactics and heavy weaponry to stall the advance of 30,000 Pakistani troops backed by fighter jets and helicopter gunships.
Suicide bombers kill seven at Islamabad University - Times Online
