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Islamabad: Two suicide bombers blew themselves up yesterday at the Pakistan Navy War College in the country's second largest city of Lahore, killing four and injuring 12 people, police said.
Senior police officer Malik Mohammad Iqbal Cheema said the two attackers came to the college on a motorbike.
One entered the college and the other stayed at the gate and both exploded themselves at almost the same time in the rare simultaneous twin suicide attacks, he told reporters in Lahore.
The police official said besides the two attackers the others killed included two naval security guards, a sanitary worker and an unknown person.
He said due to the impact of the blasts compressed natural gas cylinders on some vehicles parked on the premises exploded, setting the vehicles ablaze.
Television footage
Body parts of the suicide bombers were found from the site as investigators went to work at the war college located in a high security zone in the capital city of the Punjab province, he said.
Cheema said security in the city, known as a cultural and political hub of the country, was further beefed up following the bombing, which followed a series of suicide attacks elsewhere in the country.
The first television footage from the college showed black smoke billowing from inside the compound and several injured people with bloodstained clothes walking away. Two wrecked cars and a half-dozen damaged buses were visible behind the mangled metal gates.
Muhammad Safdar, a 23-year-old chauffeur, said he had dropped off an officer at the college and was sitting in the canteen when he heard the first blast and rushed outside. "There was smoke and vehicles on fire ... several people were lying on the ground injured and crying for help, but I too was injured as something hit me in the neck," Safdar told reporters.
Sealed off
Security personnel quickly sealed off the area, a high-security neighbourhood that includes the state governor's residence, a luxury hotel and several government offices.
The college, which trains senior naval officials from Pakistan and other countries, is the latest target in a campaign of bombing that has killed hundreds in recent months and relented only briefly during the February 18 parliamentary elections.
On February 25, the surgeon general of the army was killed in the garrison city of Rawalpindi near Islamabad when a man blew himself up close to his official car at a traffic light.
Four days later a suicide bombing at funeral of a slain police officer at Mingora in militancy-plagued Swat valley in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) left around 50 people dead.
On Sunday, a bomber exploded himself amid hundreds of tribesmen attending a tribal peace jirga at Darra Adamkhel in NWFP, killing around 40.
- With inputs from AP
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