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Pakistan on alert against attacks

Nirupama Subramanian

Three militants killed in blast

ISLAMABAD: Hit by the Samjhauta firebombing on one side, Pakistan is grappling with evidence that the wave of terror in its own soil that began last month and has so far claimed over 40 lives, is far from finished.

Three suspected militants were blown up in Multan in Punjab province on Saturday when the explosives they were carrying detonated. They were on a bicycle.

Madrassa links

Police said that two of the men were from a madrassa that had links with the Sipah-e-Sahibah, a Sunni sectarian group banned by the Musharraf regime in 2002, but that, according to several Pakistani media reports, has since resurfaced as the Millat-e-Islamia.

Pakistan is on high alert with intelligence agencies warning of more bomb attacks across the country.

The Interior Ministry has reportedly heightened security at state-run hospitals, and the Foreign Office has asked diplomats and foreign nationals to restrict their movements, the Dawn reported.

At the same time, the Interior Ministry claims to have averted at least four big attacks in different parts of Pakistan, with the arrests of 19 suspects. The terror scare has heightened after girls' schools in the North West Frontier Province received threats of bomb attacks if students and teachers did not wear the burka.

Four schools in Peshawar are reported to have closed down after receiving such threats.

Police do not view the killing of a woman minister earlier this week by a religious fanatic who said it was against Islam for women to hold public office as related to the bombings.

But some analysts have sought to draw a broader link between the killing and the Islamist extremism that is believed to be behind the terror wave as part of the same phenomenon.

Suggesting that those behind the attacks were likely to use new methods to escape detection, one newspaper, quoting intelligence officials, said Pakistan Air Force-run schools in Peshawar were under threat, not from the usual bearded and salwar kameez-clad type of bomber, but a "female suicide bomber in fashionable clothes and sunglasses."

The last big attack in a Quetta courthouse last Saturday killed 16 persons, including a judge.

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