Christina Lamb and Nicola Smith in Lahore

The Sunday Times
March 8, 2009

The Pakistan terrorist attack and its aftermath have underlined the violence and corruption at the heart of a nuclear nation

THE grainy CCTV footage showing the escape of the Lahore killers has none of the drama of an action movie getaway, yet all the atmosphere of a Hitchcock film. Less than four minutes after blasting a tour by the Sri Lanka cricket team into carnage, the perpetrators are seen strolling calmly through the narrow back streets of Liberty market.

It is their nonchalance that is most chilling. One sequence shows a man arriving on a motorbike in a deserted street. Two others with guns slung over their shoulders mount the bike, which drives off. They look like men confident of not being caught.

Minutes earlier, at 8.40am on Tuesday, they had shocked the nation and the world by ambushing the Sri Lankan team bus, dealing a lethal blow to Pakistan’s national sport. Coming soon after a deal with militants that handed control of the one-time tourist haven of the Swat valley to the Taliban, the attack set off alarm bells from London to Washington about the potential collapse of the nuclear-armed country.

The bus had picked up the team at the Pearl Continental hotel and was following the same route for the third consecutive day with a police van in front and behind and four motorcycle outriders. As it made its way round the Liberty roundabout, half a mile from the Gaddafi stadium, two cars appeared and a rocket-propelled grenade was fired.

"It missed and flew into a wall,” said Khalil Ahmed, the bus driver. "Almost immediately afterwards a person ran in front of the bus and threw a hand grenade in our direction. But it rolled underneath the coach and did not seem to cause that much damage.” Masked gunmen descended on the roundabout from three directions and opened fire. "The gunmen targeted the wheels first, then the bus,” said Mahela Jayawardene, one of the terrified Sri Lankan cricketers on board. "We all dived to the floor to take cover.”

The quick thinking of the driver, who made off at top speed, probably saved the players’ lives. Even so, six policemen and a driver were killed while six players and two assistant coaches were wounded. Even in a country increasingly inured to violence - three bombings killed 15 in the northwest yesterday - there was outrage at both the audacity of the onslaught and its targeting of a cherished sport.

There was also bewilderment. Why would anyone target players from a country with which Pakistan is on friendly terms? And how did the gunmen get away so easily?

A police station stands within half a mile of the Liberty roundabout yet no policemen emerged to help colleagues. Nobody was more horrified by the lack of reinforcements than Mohammad Afzal, one of the police outriders. "Bullets were bouncing on the road next to us,” he said in hospital after being shot in the eye and leg. "It was raining fire.”

Afzal had been issued with no weapon or flak jacket. "The attackers had such heavy weapons, we were overwhelmed,” he added. "My colleague Tanwir was lying on the ground. I saw one of the gunmen calmly shoot him dead and then the terrorists all just walked away.” Asif Mahmood, an interior decorator, witnessed one of many missed opportunities to give chase. He had just dropped his children at school when he almost collided head-on with a red Hyundai Santro.

Mahmood wound down his window to confront the offending driver but the words froze in his mouth. "The car contained four young men, not older than 25, all holding guns,” he said. "When one of them pointed a gun at me I quickly reversed out of their way.” As the car sped off, Mahmood ran to tell two policemen standing next to a police jeep. They did not pursue the vehicle but called their superiors.

The slow reaction of the police, combined with the coolness of the assassins, led many to suspect an inside job. In previous terrorist attacks in Pakistan, the perpetrators appeared to have considerable intelligence about their targets. Car bombers have struck at army and police headquarters without hindrance.

President Asif Ali Zardari vowed the attackers would be punished "with iron hands”. Sketches of the gunmen were issued and the state government of Punjab offered a 10m rupee (£88,000) reward for information leading to their capture. Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the foreign minister, said the government had "constituted a special team of investigators”. Their report, promised for Friday, has yet to emerge.

Pakistan’s police are underequipped, earn £70 a month and have been the main victims of violence that has claimed 1,600 lives in two years. No explanation ever emerged for the mysterious plane crash in which President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq died in 1988, nor for the murder in 1996 of Murtaza, brother of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, nor for her assassination in 2007. Any evidence was quickly removed by hosing down the street.

Dr Ayesha Siddiqa, a military analyst, doubts it will be any different this time: "These people have local linkages, meaning they can disappear quickly. They might have linkages with law enforcement agencies. The politics is that people don’t want to admit this.”

Khusro Pervez, the Lahore police commissioner, confessed there had been "major security lapses”. The Sri Lankan team had agreed to tour Pakistan after receiving assurances of presidential-style security. Yet no attempt was made to block traffic. "When they were escorted,” Pervez admitted, "the [police] vehicles used were not the appropriate vehicles.” Perhaps crucially, nearly all the senior posts in the Lahore and Punjab police had just been changed. Ten days ago Nawaz Sharif, the opposition leader, was banned from elected office by Pakistan’s Supreme Court, along with his brother Shahbaz, who was forced to step down as chief minister of Punjab. Zardari put his own party in charge and replaced key police and security officers.

"Mr Zardari invited this problem,” Sharif said. "He was so busy in toppling Shahbaz and horse-trading, trying to buy over our MPs to turn their minority into a majority, that they left a security vacuum which enabled the attack. They kicked out our competent people and posted nincompoops.”

As usual, the kneejerk reaction in Pakistan was to blame Indian intelligence for the attacks. But the authorities now privately admit that the attack was home-grown. Similarities with the commando-style Mumbai attacks last November led many to point the finger at Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a militant group originally set up by Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service in the 1980s to fight as proxies in Kashmir. Despite being banned, it has continued to operate from its headquarters at Muridke, just outside Lahore.

One theory is that the gunmen, whose rucksacks contained dried fruit and nuts, power bars and energy drinks, had been planning to hold the cricketers hostage to secure the release of activists arrested after the Mumbai shootings, in which 173 people died.

LeT has denied responsibility and security officials said they were focusing on two other militant groups, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (L-e-J) and Jaish-e-Mohammed. It was L-e-J that bombed a Karachi hotel where the New Zealand cricket team were staying in 2002. Like LeT, both these groups were promoted by ISI to fight in Kashmir in the 1990s and trigger sectarian violence against Shi’ites, providing an excuse to impose military rule.

"Lots of groups have come up in the last 10 years and we don’t know who’s controlling who or what group is under whose control,” said Sharif. "This is the tragedy. We just don’t know.”

Under pressure to produce results, police have arrested about 90 people and claim to have identified a little-known mastermind called Muhammad Aqil without specifying the group with which he is associated. Although the gunmen remained at large, at least five of those detained were believed to be local "facilitators”. Another was Muhammad Faisal, Aqil’s roommate. Mobile phones discarded at the scene have been crucial in tracking suspects. Faisal and Khurram Nawaz, two brothers working at a transport hire company, were linked by a Sim card used by the terrorists.

Unlike Pakistan’s military rulers, Zardari has no sympathy for the militant groups, pointing out that he lost his own wife, Benazir Bhutto, to terrorism. But he heads a weak minority government in alliance with an Islamic party linked to some of them. While Pakistan remains a largely moderate country, support for militants has increased with public anger at US drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These have killed senior Taliban or Al-Qaeda commanders but also many civilians.

"Zardari may wish to be rid of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, the LeT and other affiliated terrorist groups, but he cannot afford to be seen to cave in to western and Indian pressure”, said MJ Gohel, director of the Asia Pacific Foundation. "The terrorist infrastructure is being allowed to continue functioning with only cosmetic restrictions, whose main function is to impress the US. Yet until firm action is taken and training camps are closed down, the slow collapse of the Pakistani state will continue.”

In less than a year Zardari has lost control of much of the North West Frontier Province to the Pakistani Taliban. Militant groups have been openly fundraising, advertising in newspapers and collecting funds at government mosques. A failing Pakistan is a worry for Britain, with its large Pakistani population. According to David Miliband, the foreign secretary, 70% of the terrorist plots being investigated in Britain can be traced back to Pakistan. Miliband urged Zardari and Sharif to unite.

Sharif agreed: "Pakistan faces huge problems which no single party can deal with singlehandedly. How can we fight the extremists if we don’t stop fighting each other?” There was no sign of reconciliation in Lahore last week as an angry crowd of up to 20,000 pro-Sharif demonstrators gathered to support the brothers’ fiery rhetoric against Zardari. This week Sharif plans to join a "long march” from Lahore to Islamabad by lawyers campaigning for the restoration of a chief justice and Supreme Court judges ousted by General Pervez Musharraf, who resigned as president last August.

As if the political and security problems were not enough, Pakistan is also in the midst of its worst economic crisis for decades. Inflation is running at 25% and blackouts have closed down much of its textile industry. Last year Pakistan had to go to the International Monetary Fund for an emergency bailout of $7.6 billion. Zardari has repeatedly begged the West for more aid, pointing out that poverty and unemployment are fuelling extremism.

All of this is being watched with dismay by the administration of President Barack Obama, which is starting to see Pakistan as even more dangerous than Afghanistan. Three days after his inauguration in January, Obama held a national security council meeting on the region. According to Time magazine, his political aides were stunned by the deteriorating situation: "The general feeling was expressed by one person at the end who said, ‘Holy shit’.”

A joint White House and State Department review of the region by Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, is expected to be completed in time for a Nato summit next month. "Everybody in Washington recognises that Pakistan is a huge problem but there are no coherent tactics,” said Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It is widely acknowledged that a reform of the ISI to sift out Taliban sympathisers is crucial but nobody knows how to do that without destabilising the Zardari government.

Counter-terrorism training has been offered and economic aid will be quadrupled, with much of the money to be spent on education in the hope that there will be less preaching of hatred towards the West. If nothing works, America could be confronted with the nightmare of a nuclear-armed and fragmented Pakistan in the hands of Islamic radicals.

For years the United States has been studying how to remove or disable Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in the event of an emergency, but it is highly delicate. "The more the United States talks about taking them out, the more incentive there is to disperse them in out of the way places where they are harder to find and easier to steal,” said Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Meanwhile, the search continues for those behind last week’s attack in Lahore. Most Pakistanis are resigned to the view that, as usual, the real culprits will never be found.

Additional reporting: Aoun Sahi, Lahore; Daoud Khan, Peshawar; Sarah Baxter, Washington