Pakistan army camp attacked

ISLAMABAD – Gunmen killed eight people in an attack Monday on a Pakistani army camp near a city where thousands of hardline Islamists stopped on their way to the capital to protest the decision to reopen the NATO supply line to Afghanistan, police said.

Police were searching for the attackers, and it was unclear if any of the Islamist protesters were involved, said Basharat Mahmood, police chief in the eastern city of Gujrat near where the attack occurred.

“It is surely a terrorist attack,” said Mahmood.

The gunmen who attacked the camp were riding in a car and on motorcycles. They killed seven soldiers at the camp and a policeman who tried to intercept them, said Mahmood.

The camp near Gujrat was attacked at around 5:20 a.m., a little less than an hour after the leaders of the Difah-e-Pakistan, or Defense of Pakistan, protest movement finished delivering speeches inside the city, police said.

The group, which includes hardline Islamist politicians and religious leaders, left the city of Lahore on Sunday. They reached Islamabad late Monday, where they staged a rally on the main avenue running through the city toward the parliament.

Police estimated the crowd at 30,000 to 40,000 people. Among the speakers was Hafiz Saeed, who heads what is widely believed to be a front for a militant group that is blamed for the attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008 that killed more than 160 people.

The U.S. had a $10 million bounty on Saeed, but he operates freely in the country. Pakistan says it doesn’t have enough evidence to arrest Saeed, but many suspect the government is reluctant to move against him and other militant leaders because they have long-standing ties with the country’s military and intelligence service.

The Pakistani Taliban took responsibility for the attack on the soldiers. A Taliban spokesman, Ahsanullah Ahsan, made the claim to the Associated Press by telephone from an undisclosed location.