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Five dead in Pakistani navy bus attack
[Al Jazeera] A blast has hit a bus carrying Pak navy officials in the southern city of Bloody Karachi, killing five people, officials have said.

"Now a total of four of our employees - all sailors - have been martyred in the attack on our bus while seven others are injured," navy front man Commander Salman Ali told AFP.

A hospital official said a passerby was also killed in the incident, which took place in the city's busy Faisal avenue.

About three kilogrammes of explosives were packed into the bomb which exploded remotely, senior police official Iftikhar Tarar said.

Bloody Karachi is Pakistain's commercial hub and also home to the navy's main base.

Thursday's blast occurred two days after two other navy buses were attacked in the city. Four people were killed in those blasts and 56 others maimed.

Both the Baluchistan Liberation Army and the Pak Taliban grabbed credit for Tuesday's attacks, which police said were carried out with remotely controlled bombs roughly 15 minutes apart in different areas of the city.

The Taliban vowed to continue attacks on the country's military until it stops targeting the group in the country's northwest.

Fighters have not targeted the navy in the past and security experts say the attacks on the navy, seen as a soft target with less effective protection, could be part of a new strategy to widen their violent campaign.

"It's not the navy that is being targeted, it is the armed forces," Moinuddin Haider, a former interior minister and retired army general, said.

"And the most dangerous thing is that IEDs [improvised bombs] and remote bombs are now being used. This is a new thing which here first started in Iraq and has caused a lot of damage in Afghanistan."

The attacks this week on the military in Bloody Karachi were the first since 2004 when assailants ambushed a convoy escorting the Bloody Karachi army corps commander. The general beat feet that attack.

In 2002, 11 French engineers and technicians working on the construction of submarines for the Pak navy were killed, along with three Paks in a suicide car booming outside a hotel in Bloody Karachi.
Posted by: Fred 2011-04-29
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=321435