Gunners fired after President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's plane took off from a military base on Friday in what one official described as a failed assassination attempt. Security forces quickly raided a nearby home with anti-aircraft guns on the roof, taking the owner in for questioning and searching for a couple who rented the property this week, officials said.
A senior security official said Musharraf was aboard when the plane came under fire, but insisted the aircraft was not within range of the attempt in Rawalpindi, a garrison city south of the capital where Musharraf narrowly escaped two attempts on his life in 2003.
Television footage from an overlooking building showed a large gun pointed skyward next to a satellite dish as security officials rushed around. Two anti-aircraft guns and a light machine gun were found on the roof and the homeowner was taken in for questioning, three officials told The Associated Press.
"It was an unsuccessful effort by miscreants to target the president's plane," the senior security official told AP. The official, like those who described the raid on the house, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. "They fled quickly, and our security agencies are still investigating."
Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad denied local news reports that the president's plane was targeted by a rocket, but provided no further details.
A resident in the neighborhood, Mohammed Asif, 31, said that he heard two loud bangs about "a minute or less than a minute" apart and then saw a man firing an AK-47 rifle from an off-white Suzuki car passing by his home.
"A small plane was flying at that time," Asif, a worker in Rawalpindi's fruit market, told an AP reporter.
According to state-run Pakistan Television, Musharraf flew from the air base Friday and later safely landed in Turbat, a remote southwestern town where he was to inspect efforts to bring relief to hundreds of thousands of people affected by recent catastrophic flooding.
Khan Mohammed, a road construction worker, who was in a nearby street, said he heard someone fire single shots and then a burst from an automatic weapon but he said he didn't know where the gunfire originated or what it was aimed at.
"It lasted for about five minutes," Mohammed said.
Mohammed said that he heard the roar of a flying plane when the firing occurred.
In northwestern Pakistan, a suicide attacker on a bicycle rigged with explosives struck a military convey and killed four soldiers Friday, officials said. And a remote-controlled bomb exploded near a military convoy in Dir, in the same area.
In North Waziristan, elsewhere in the Afghan border region, tribesmen chased militants who had kidnapped an army instructor, sparking a shootout that left six people dead and the soldier injured, officials said.