Terrorist attack kills 9 in Lahore

Gunmen shot dead nine police and prison staff as they slept on Thursday, the second attack on security forces since Islamabad reopened a NATO supply corridor. Police said the dawn attack, in which 10 gunmen stormed a residential property housing officers from the northwest who were in the city for training, bore the hallmarks of a similar assault on an army camp on Monday. The killings raise fears of a fresh wave of violence in Punjab that will be vital in upcoming general elections, and which for the past year had seen a lull in attacks blamed on Taliban-linked insurgents. Punjab police chief Habibur Rehman said the attackers came on three motorcycles and one car, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades. They then stormed the building in the densely populated area of Ichra, where up to 35 police and prison staff were sleeping early Thursday. "Nine people have died so far in this attack," Rehman told reporters at the scene. Rescue workers wrapped bodies in white sheets and survivors sobbed over the deaths of their colleagues as bullet casings lay discarded outside the two-storey grey building, television footage showed. Lahore city police chief Aslam Tareen told AFP that nine people were also wounded. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but police blamed the "same gang" who killed seven security personnel at an army camp in Punjab's district of Gujrat, 150 kilometres (100 miles) southeast of Islamabad, on Monday. "All defunct organisations are working in close cooperation with each other" to attack security forces, Rehman told reporters. A senior security official told AFP that in Monday's attack it was "highly likely" that the gunmen belonged to a banned organisation in league with the Taliban. Considered Pakistan's cultural capital and close to the Indian border, Lahore is a city of eight million that in 2010 suffered a string of high-profile bombings blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda.