The team was fortunate to escape with injuries to five players. But the attack, on a moving convoy of vehicles taking the cricketers from their hotel to the Gaddafi Stadium, left eight persons dead, including six policemen in the escort team. Earlier reports put the death toll at seven.
Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry head, said a “foreign hand” was behind the attack. Police said 10 to 12 men, some wearing masks, were involved in the attack which bore some chilling similarities to the November 26-29, 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Footage, captured by a television channel, showed three armed young men carrying rucksacks on their backs and running athletically while they shot at the convoy as it made its way around Liberty Chowk, a well-known commercial district of Lahore, around 8.40 a.m.
One of the attackers was wearing the typically Paksitani salwar-kameez, while two others were dressed in jackets, jeans and white shoes that looked like sneakers.
None of the attackers was killed in what the police described as “a 25-minute exchange of fire” between them and the convoy’s police escort.
The government hailed the bravery of the policemen who lost their lives, but there was widespread public criticism that none of the attackers was caught, even though they had no getaway vehicle and appeared to have just run away.
The escaping attackers are said to have ditched some of their bags from which police said they recovered large quantities of weapons and ammunition. Unconfirmed reports said that armed men hijacked a car a few hundred metres from the site of the attack.
Mr. Malik, speaking to journalists outside the National Assembly in the capital, said he did “not rule out a foreign hand.” Using a more definite language later in the interaction, he said, “There is a foreign hand.” But he declined to name the country, and rejected reports that some of the weapons found by the police carried Indian markings.
Official Pakistan pledged to hunt down the perpetrators and give them “exemplary punishment” and dubbed the attack the work of the “enemies of Pakistan-Sri Lanka friendship.” President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani spoke to Sri Lankan President Rajapakse.
Unofficial Pakistan, including its electronic media, was awash with speculative theories that Indian intelligence agencies were behind the attack. Talking heads on television blamed India’s Research and Analysis Wing.
Quoting unidentified sources, Geo Television said an intelligence report in January specifically warned against an Indian intelligence terror plot on the Sri Lankan cricket team.
But media analysts did not rule out that the Lashkar-e-Taiba may have retaliated against the crackdown on it in the wake of the Mumbai attacks. The possibility of the involvement of the embattled LTTE was also discussed. Sri Lankan diplomatic sources in Islamabad said this was unlikely.
The players were evacuated in a military helicopter from the ground where they were to play their second Test against Pakistan. They took pictures of themselves as they boarded the chopper that took them to the airport from where they flew to Colombo.
“Point scoring”Pakistan said on Tuesday it “deeply regrets the spate of official statements from New Delhi” on the terror attack, saying it was “tantamount to political point scoring over a hugely tragic incident.”
A Foreign Office statement said terrorism was prevalent in all of South Asia, and in order to combat it, “serious, sustained and pragmatic cooperation” at the regional level was required. It recalled that last week’s SAARC Ministerial Council in Colombo had affirmed this view.
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