Suicide attack targets Lahore police station

A police complex in the relatively peaceful eastern Pakistani city of Lahore was hit by a suicide attack on Tuesday, killing at leave five and wounding many others in the blast and ensuing fire, although the bomber was not able to get inside the building, police official Haidar Ashraf said.

A Pakistani Taliban splinter group took responsibility for the attack in a phone call to the Associated Press. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, as the group calls itself, said the attack was in retaliation for the recent executions of some of their members by the government.

"Such attacks will go on," promised the group's spokesman, Ahsanullah Ahsan. In December, the Pakistani government lifted a moratorium on the death penalty following an attack on an army school in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Initial reports indicated a man on foot ran towards the gate of one of the main police buildings and blew himself up, police chief Amin Wains told reporters.

Such bombings and militant violence are rare, though not unheard of, in Lahore, Pakistan's cultural capital which is also the power base of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

In neighboring Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban launched a similar attack on a police station, killing more than 20 officers with four suicide bombers. Two of the attackers reached their targets inside the provincial police headquarters, while the other two were gunned down in a firefight with police.

The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are separate entities, though they share the goal of establishing Islamist rule in their respective countries.

es/rc (AP, Reuters)